THERE'S NEVER BEEN A PEOPLE WITH SO MUCH TO FEEL BAD ABOUT:

Sarah's Key: unlocking French self-loathing (Neil Davenport, 9/01/11, spiked)

Recent French films have keenly explored the issue of collaboration with Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. Until recently, most French films stuck to a Gaullist line, depicting France as a nation of plucky resistance fighters against Nazi troops. In 2002, Laissez-Passer also depicted heroic resistance fighters, but notably dwelled on how politicians and police chiefs enthusiastically collaborated with Nazi commanders. When one SS officer scornfully asks a French politician 'why did you lot roll over so easily?', it suggested that the gloves were coming off regarding France's shameful past. Army of Crime (2009), essentially a remake of Army of Shadows (1969), explicitly showed French secret agents working with Nazi officers in the persecution of Jews and communists, while the biopic of French icon (Serge) Gainsbourg (2010) was told in the shadow of Vel d'Hiv and respectable anti-Semitism in France.

But two films that deal specifically with Vel d'Hiv, The Round Up (2010) and the recently released Sarah's Key, reveal a rather morbid fascination with this episode of national shame. Both films tackle the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of Paris-based Jews in July 1942 by French, as opposed to Nazi, authorities. Both films are unflinching in their portrayal of people being treated in the most appalling and barbaric fashion. No matter how grimly familiar the road to Auschwitz has become to us, both films have the capacity to shock and horrify. But whereas The Round Up is shot almost like a factual documentary, Sarah's Key clumsily attempts to draw therapeutic lessons about confronting 'secrets from the past'. In doing so, it contributes to the notion that a good French national identity can only be constructed through feeling bad about the past.

Until they learn to despise the Revolution they'll have made no progress.

Posted by oj at September 2, 2011 6:17 AM
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