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Friday, august 26, 2011

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todayHarrison with Tom

Janet Jackson
Where: Queen Elizabeth Theatre Why: Seeing her at the QET puts the truth in this Number Ones Up Close And Personal Tour. The last few times Jackson was here, she played the enormodromes (hockey rinks). Its also reality. Believe it or not, its been about 30 years since Control established her as an important (and wilfully independent) pop artist. Shes netted five Grammies, gained recognition as one of the most successful acts in pop history and spawned plenty of copy cats (hello, Britney Spears) but the 2,800 capacity QET is evidence of a crisis in popular music as well as her current standing. When: 8:30 p.m. Tickets: $65.00, 115.00, 199.00 at ticketmaster.ca, livenation.com

Janet Jackson will be performing at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

RIC ERNST PNG FILES

CLUB GIG

B3 Kings and Denzal Sinclaire

Where: Cory Weeds Jazz Cellar, 3611 W. Broadway Why: By B3 Kings the assumption must be made that these kings play the Hammond organ, so expect some deep, growling jazz, Jimmy McGriff-style. When last heard, the marvellous Sinclaire was a guest on the new album by Jaclyn Guillou. When: 9 p.m. Tickets: At the door

the phrase launching party, so anyone curious about electro swing and thus is planning to attend will be on the ground floor of a new regular event. Swing implies big band orchestration from the 40s but electro says electronica with synthesizers, turntables and such. Put the two together and a heavy dance rhythm probably is the result. With Sweetpea Swing Band, VanDolls Burlesque swing show and DJ Rudy & DJ Eliazer. When: 9 p.m. Tickets: $12

Sarahs Key, based on a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, is a drama about an american journalist (Kristin Scott Thomas) who discovers a disturbing secret about the Holocaust in France in 1942. HUGO PRODUCTIONS

Wartime secret unlocked

adapTaTIon:

Powerful drama or contrived melodrama?

By Jay STonE
Postmedia News

Movie review
Sarahs Key
Warning: PG: No advisory. 103 minutes Grade: BTheatres, showtimes, B10-B11

LIVE MUSIC

Carol Bolas, Joseph Blood, Luke Isaac

Where: Trees, 450 Granville St. Why: The coffee house regularly has in new acts each Thursday and Friday. Although the accent is on acoustic music, its not always. This night seems slanted toward country folk. Bolas is an unknown but Blood has been drawing favourable comparisons to Gram Parsons and Isaac is beginning to make some noise in the contemporary country field. When: 8 p.m. Tickets: By donation
tharrison@theprovince.com

CLUB GIG

Electro Swing Club Vancouver

Where: Backstage Lounge, 1585 Johnston St., Granville Island Why: The full billing of Electro Swing Club includes

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The Holocaust drama Sarahs Key is something like the Anne Frank story in reverse: In France in 1942, a Jewish family in the Marais district of Paris is arrested and taken away. Before they are, 10-year-old Sarah (Melusine Mayance) locks her younger brother in a secret closet in the bedroom and promises to come back for him. She carries with her the small key that will open it, but she is on the road to Auschwitz. That is half the story of Sarahs Key, and it comes with the harrowing intensity of such tragic war stories: people rounded up by cruel officials, locked in a transit camp (the Velodrome dHiver in Paris, where thousands of Jews were in fact kept with little food or water for days after the infamous Vel dHiv roundup), separated from their families, shipped to concentration camps. They had it coming to them, a woman yells from a window across the street from the velodrome, as hundreds of men, women and children yellow stars stitched to their chests are forced inside. The guards, by the way, are not Nazi soldiers, but gendarmes. Among other things, Sarahs Key is about the complicity of France in the Holocaust. And meanwhile, the clock is ticking away on Sarahs young brother, locked in a closet at home. The other half of the story takes place

in the present day. Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist who has married a French architect named Bertrand (Frederic Pierrot, her co-star in Ive Loved You So Long), is doing a magazine story on the Holocaust. She and Bertrand are about to renovate the Marais district apartment, a place that has belonged to his family for 60 years. Theyve lived there since the war, in fact. Based on a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarahs Key is a drama that is at once powerful in its depictions of wartime cruelty wrenching scenes of families being forcibly separated in transit camps, or of mothers trying to throw food through barbed wire to their children held on the other side and contrived in the melodrama of its secrets. Julias investigations lead her into the past, a murky country at the best of times. It was wartime, people say, and even Julia is led to ask, How do you know what you would have done? A witness to the 1942 roundup says, What could we do anyway? Call the

police? and her point would be stronger if we didnt suspect that shes the same woman who yelled from the window across from the velodrome. Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner (Walled In) moves between the 1940s and today, but it is always Sarahs story that is most compelling, helped along by the performance of young French actress Melusine Mayance, who gives the girl a mature intelligence that is heartbreaking in the circumstances. But the key she carries weighs down both her character and the plot: It becomes one of those clunky movie symbols that defy realism. As our stand-in as witness to the horrors, Scott Thomas is reliably clearheaded (and her French is impeccable), but the addition of marital complications and an improbable bunch of inlaws people who have a secret stash of letters that explain the past, but that they have never looked at, for instance take the film into melodrama. Sarahs Key does succeed in bringing the Holocaust into the present day. Julias life is saturated in guilt it feels like residue thats left when the blame melts even as the film leaves the wartime scenes, turning away from its worst excesses, and becomes instead a mystery about what happened to one person. We keep watching, even as we become more distant from her, and maybe thats the point.
jstone@postmedia.com canada.com/stonereport