Contagion

Contagion’

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

With Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Marion Cttillard,

Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle and Elliot Gould

The terror resulting from seeing the brilliant and gripping Steven Soderburgh film, “Contagion,” comes not from terrorists; but from a virus. The content of this unnerving story about a worldwide pandemic was carefully researched and fact checked by epidemiologists. It is very, very real.

“Contagion” unfolds in countdown style beginning on “Day 2” of the epidemic. A businesswoman, Beth Emhoff (Gwenth Paltrow), is returning from Hong Kong and is on a layover in Chicago en route to her family in Minneapolis. She coughs. She has just been on a long flight from Hong Kong. She uses her credit card, she nibbles from a bowl of peanuts, she touches door handles, her face, stair rails, napkins. In the meantime, a waiter in Hong Kong sneezes all over the people and the food he is serving and returns to his teeming apartment complex. A Tokyo businessman home from a meeting in Hong Kong collapses on a very crowded train. And so it begins.

The film jumps all over the world showing everything happening at once. Places and dates and numbers of those infected are shown. The virus has spread lickity-split.

The Center for Disease Control headed by Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is mobilized into action to try to track and fight the spread of the disease. Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is in Geneva mobilizing the forces of the World Health Organization. Erin Meers (Kate Winslet), a scrupulous medical intelligence specialist, goes to Minneapolis to convert huge sports stadiums into makeshift hospitals. Soon there will be no medical personnel left to treat the sick and dying.

Charts show how far the virus has spread, how many thousands, then millions, have died. Clearly the Internet and the media play crucial roles in information and misinformation. A self-serving blogger, Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), posts incorrect information on the Web, also stating he has found a homeopathic cure called Forsythia. He meets with hedge fund guys who back the pseudo cure. Panicked people line up at pharmacies, there are riots, supermarkets are looted, whole cities are quarantined. The social fabric has been disrupted and a sense of helplessness prevails. There is a frantic race to develop a vaccine.

“Contagion” is full of human touches. Beth Emhoff’s husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), frantically tries to protect his family from the virus. Amidst all the chaos, Dr Cheever is desperately trying to convince his wife to go to a safe area.

Director Soderburgh could have ratcheted up the horror by showing the agonies of death, bodies putrifying and the like. But he tells the story straight. The human dimension is explored by introducing specific people and their personal  involvement with the epidemic. Mentions are made of AIDS, SARS, SWINE FLU, H1N1, the Ebola Virus, the Spanish Flu of 1918. It is all very real. And you don’t find out the source of the virus until the very last moments of the film. We really should be scared.

Sarah's Key

Sarah’s Key

Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner

With Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Aiden Quinn, Frederic

Pierrt and Niels Arestrup

In July 1942, the  French police rounded up thousands of Jews, warehousing them for days in absolutely horrific conditions in the Vel d hiv bicycle stadium..  There were no toilets, no water, no food, no ventilation.  They were then herded into trains and trucks and sent to Auschwitz.    The French inflicted these horrors on their own people.

Sarah’s Key, a serious and handsomely produced film, directed by  Gilles Paquet –Brenner, examines this infamous incident and the aftershocks which continue to the present.    The movie tells parallel stories of a present day American journalist Julia Jarmond(Kristin Scott Thomas) and  a victim of the round up, Sarah Starzynski(Melusine Mayance). 

Julia stumbles upon the history of Sarah when she and her French husband                     (Frederic Pierrot) begin to renovate the Paris apartment that has been owned by her husband’s family for years.   It is the very apartment from which Sarah’s family was seized 60 years before.   Julia is writing about the Vel d hiv incident for a French Magazine and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the Jewish family snatched from the apartment.  In doing so, she uncovers her husband’s family secret.

On the day of the round up, 8 year old Sarah hides her younger brother in a closet.  Her family is sent to the nightmarish fetid and filthy transit

camp and finally is trucked to a concentration camp, separated forever.  Sarah is determined to somehow get back to her brother who she locked in a closet. 

Through assiduous research and travels to Italy and New York City,

Julia pieces together Sarah’s story.   Her findings cause problems in her own relationship with her husband and his family. 

The time shifting narrative shows what becomes of Sarah who eventually has her own family.  But the horrors are etched on her soul and she cannot get beyond her pain.

Overhead shots pan the transit camp; there are close-up hand held camera shots that capture the terror, desperation, exhaustion on the faces of the prisoners.   A sense of doom is pervasive.

Kristin Scott Thomas is absolutely radiant throughout Sarah’s Key.

Melusine Mayance as the poignant young Sarah is perfect as a child determined to protect her sibling and then to somehow survive.

There are scores of Holocaust dramas.  However, audiences want happy endings,so many of these stories end on an ‘up’ note.  Sarah’s Key refuses

to make the audience feel good and to show a bright side.   What happened then is beyond horrific; the film expresses an important truth.