'Sarah's Key': Holocaust secrets unlocked

Based on Tatiana de Rosnay's 2007 novel, "Sarah's Key" comes tantalizingly close to unconventionality before succumbing to the more routine principles of Holocaust drama. One praiseworthy aspect of the film, not surprisingly, is the performance by Kristin Scott Thomas, who continues her flourishing French film career by playing Julia Jarmond, a magazine journalist exploring the notorious Velodrome d'Hiver roundup (during which French authorities, at the behest of the Nazis, arrested 13,000 Jews and held them in the celebrated bicycle-racing arena before shipping them off to Auschwitz). Julia's research provides a window into the past, which is often far more interesting than Julia.

However: In researching her story, Julia comes across the account of a young girl named Sarah (Mélusine Mayance), who, during the roundup, tried to save her younger brother by locking him in a closet. Julia follows the long-ago story, and she finds an increasingly disturbing connection to her husband and his family, who, naturally, discourage her increasingly obsessive investigation. In the parallel story line, Sarah attempts to escape the Germans, return to Paris and free her brother, who's still trapped in that closet. She thinks.

Where director Gilles Paquet-Brenner goes right is venturing into the legacy of the Holocaust, questions of pan-generational guilt and Julia's personalization of others' victimization -- the subplot involving her pregnancy, and her husband's resistance to it, is a distraction. Where the director goes wrong is via his undernourished action, sentimentalization of sequences involving Sarah and a common enough problem: not knowing when to apply the dramatic brakes regarding the Holocaust. This is not Paquet-Brenner's quandary alone among filmmakers, but it's certainly that of "Sarah's Key."