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8 November
Here, in one place (I think that only three are on Rotten Tomatoes), are the works of criticism - some would say metacriticism - of the four reviews that appeared in the UK press...
Finally, (althought he didn't appear to put his name to it) Tim Robey at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8682252/Sarahs-Key-review.html
To which the retort, on 20 August, was:
Sadly, this review is not to be trusted, and I would, also sadly, doubt that there is only one such review a summer.
(Is there even such a word as 'dismayingly'? Is the use of the word 'tenterhooks' meant to be echoed by the use of 'dramatic hook' later in the sentence? How can filmmaking embody 'tongue-tied worthiness' (and what is it anyway)? Where, when and with how much thought was this assemblage of paragraphs dictated?)
'The role of Julia Jarmond, an American reporter in Paris, is dismayingly routine, for all the empathy and conviction she manages to summon.' Should this be interpreted as:
She plays the role of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, but, despite the empathy and conviction that she manages to summon to it, her character's situation dismays by being so routine.
(Obviously the crafted comment of someone who knows when 'wincingly wooden English-language exchanges' (of which there are very few in the film) are shown on screen, and could do much better!)
So what is routine about finding out what Julia does about the place where her husband's family used to live and taking off in search of some answers, and without explaining to anyone what she is doing?
Oh, I forgot that's to be dismissed by writing that 'the trail of flashbacks and letters and far-flung familial ties stretches far across the horizon of head-slapping cliché'.
Funny that no one was doing this head-slapping on either occasion when I saw the film, because people seemed engaged, and even - which is very rare - waited for the credits to finish.
Perhaps this reviewer, who thinks that the Jews were just, albeit devastatingly, 'arrested' (which is what they hoped, of course), was actually confused, as Philip French was, by following the trail, although, in fact, there's very little far-flung about the connections, which, in geographical terms, are France (where we start), the States, and Italy.
And there was nothing (to consider 'far-flung' as meaning 'improbable') unrealistic about the motives that would cause someone to go to the States, and someone else to make a home in Italy.
It is likely to mean improbability, because the dialogue in English 'turn[ed] all plausibility to mincemeat'. However, whether or not anyone speaking that phrase would have turned it to better effect, it is unclear whether this criticism is intended just for the meetings between the staff of the magazine for which Julia works, or also for the ones in the States and later, where she is talking to people unknown to her (some of whom may be more used to talking Italian, as she may be to speaking in French).
Maybe, though, a back-handed way of approving the French dialogue ... whereas the general approach of such phrases as 'a grimly tasteless suspense device' (on my reading of it, taken from the novel) is to try to slap the film about the head.
Oh, but not with anything like a cliché: with coinages that ring as little true as a wet fish wielded (in Python) on a quayside by a military John Cleese.
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