The pain of others, carried through the years, can pierce us. At the time, I was very interested in a new film in which Jean Reno played one of the main roles. This is about the 2010 drama The Roundup ("La rafle), directed by Roslyn Bosch. But not only did the name of Jean Reno appeal to me in this film, but it was a theme that intrigued me as a history buff. The roundup told about the terrible days of France during the German occupation, when the French themselves with hatred and gloating handed over thousands of Jews into the hands of the gendarmerie, who were then gathered at the Vel d'Hives stadium, where many died of deprivation, and some even committed suicide. The brutal French policemen (and how else can they be called?) mocked people like cattle, sold a breath of fresh water for fabulous money, they spared neither old men, nor women, nor children. And then these subhumans (although they considered them Jews) handed the prisoners over to the Germans, who sent them to concentration camps. We all know how many people came back from there. Anger at this vile page of French history, created by the hands of the French themselves, was undisguised.
And here's what I hear in another movie from 2010: The Germans were terrible pedants. It is strange that no facts, such as photo or video chronicles have survived. It was not the Germans, but the French. Such a dialogue took place in the film “Her name is Sarah”, where the main role was played by the brilliant English actress Christine Scott Thomas. Her character is journalist Julia Jarmont, who moves with her husband to a new spacious apartment. Having professional skills, Julia wanted to learn about the history of the past tenants of their new monastery and then terrifying facts are revealed before her: during the Jewish genocide, the family of David’s children lived here, but all of them were sent to the stadium, where they were already waiting for hunger and other deprivations. However, a young girl named Sarah decided to save her younger brother from the hands of the police and hid him in the closet, believing that soon either she or someone else will release him. Honestly, further to focus your attention on the plot does not want, because it is first of all scary, and on the other hand, the evil sorts out, as it was during the viewing of the tape “Roundup”.
The director of the film was then quite young, but already experienced director Gilles Paquet-Brenner, who was at that time 35 years old. He also contributed to the creation of the script, when, together with Serge Joncourt, he was preparing for the adaptation of the novel by French writer Tatiana De Rosne. Neither before Her Name is Sarah nor after Gilles Paquet-Brenner has any special merits for cinema, and his most popular films are “Burned in the Wall” (2007) with Tim Allen and “Dark Mysteries” (2015) with Charlize Theron. Has anyone heard of these tapes? That's it. But in the case of Her Name is Sarah, Gilles Paquet-Brenner is very lucky to take advantage of such dramatic material from Tatiana De Rosne. In principle, he already turned the picture into an object of attention of the press and criticism, because it is not a matter of art to ignore the black pages of history, on the contrary, it exposes all the sores of society, who would not want it to be otherwise. And as we are shown the journalistic investigation of Julia Jarmont, moving at the same time into the events of the past associated with the girl Sarah, you begin to understand more and more how deep was the wound that the Nazis inflicted and how long it caused unbearable pain, and how long will it go before the pain subsides?
In my humble view, Christine Scott Thomas is one of the most remarkable actresses from Albion. She is perfectly good at roles when you need to play restrained and outwardly cold ladies with a purely British style of behavior. But not only in this role, she is beautiful, for example, she perfectly demonstrates the dramatic doom of her character in Her Name is Sarah. It’s hard to say what motivates her in the first place in the investigation, most likely the professional habit of digging into the truth, but when what she wanted to know was known, she still did not stop and continued her work, although her husband was a fierce opponent of this, and her daughter did not particularly understand why it was her mother. But when the stunning things opened, the heroine Christine Scott Thomas simply could not stop, she also had a gaping wound inside. And as you watch Christine Scott Thomas play, you realize that this story has touched her as a person, not as an actress, she has become imbued with her character and helps these viewers finally understand why some people are unable to stop and why sometimes their children are called names in honor of those they have not even seen. In addition, I note that Aidan Quinn appears here in several scenes.
The film is recommended first of all to those who like to learn something new in history thanks to cinema, and then takes up literature and cleans the gaps in the knowledge of history. It is impossible to ignore the beautiful game of Christine Scott Thomas, in whose eyes you can read just how much she is experiencing the tragedy of people she has never even seen. Well, you can learn that not all the French were gallant, noble and courageous Musketeers, there are those pages of history that they would like to erase, but what has happened has already happened.
8 out of 10