“My Name is Sara” is billed as a biographical drama, and it’s. The film is based on the true story of Sara Góralnik—who escaped Nazi persecution in Poland, adopted the id of a Christian classmate, and labored as a nanny on a Ukrainian farm all through the warfare—and it is produced in affiliation with the Shoah basis and govt produced by her eldest son, Mickey Shapiro. However its cumulative influence is that of a thriller, and its simplest scenes are virtually unbearably uncomfortable, as they revolve around a personality who’s escaping genocide by pretending to be one thing she is not and might be murdered if the reality will get out.
As directed by Steven Oritt and written by David Himmelstein (screenwriter of many acclaimed historic dramas, together with “Soul of the Game”) the film excels at placing the viewers within the place of its teenage heroine (Zuzanna Surowy), who’s misplaced and alone in hostile terrain, making issues up as she goes. The story begins with Sara and her elder brother parting methods after he tells her that she has a greater probability of getting by the warfare as a result of he is extra identifiably Jewish than she is. His perception is simply partially validated: from the second that Sara will get work as a nanny on a farm in Ukraine (which can be beneath German management) barely a scene passes without someone both casting doubt on her story or her approach that makes us suppose she’s being suspected of mendacity.
Sara tells her hosts—the farmer Pavlo (Eryk Lubos) and his spouse, Nadya (Michalina Olszanska)—that she’s fleeing a foul home state of affairs: her mom died, her father remarried a lady who hates her, and now there is a new child. Pavlo accepts this story, however, Nadya thinks it is fishy. For a lot of the remainder of the movie, she stares daggers at the heroine it doesn’t matter what’s transpiring. Typically she suspects Sara of being a Jew. On different occasions, she appears to suppose the brand new lady is a hustler who will find herself seducing Pavlo. Pavlo is depressed and resentful. The Nazis are robbing him blind by demanding a set quantity of livestock and grain to feed their occupying troops. He is additionally a widower who misplaced his first spouse and their youngster (presumably within the warfare, although we do not get the small print), and there are occasions when he seems at his new spouse as if realizing he made a horrible mistake. This isn’t, to place it mildly, an awesome state of affairs, even for a makeshift wartime association.
Drawing on the true Sara’s story, the film contrives conditions of the place Sara might come upon until she manifests instincts or generates information that may allow her to “pass” (corresponding to having the ability to make the signal of the cross, some she discovered from her Christian buddies). So deft is the movie’s mastery of easy subjective filmmaking strategies that when Sara enters a small-town church, it is as if we’re following a mouse right into a barn full of cats. Typically the film turns the thumbscrews on the viewers by letting us know that an uncomfortable second is coming lengthy earlier than it occurs, as when Sara tells a lady throughout a visit to the native village that she hails from a selected metropolis, and the lady says she will be able to’t wait to see her once more subsequent week in order that she will be able to join her with someone who’s recognized her since she was a little bit lady.
The movie additionally excels at exhibiting how small-minded and thuggish occupying armies are usually. The Nazis troopers that cross paths with Sara and her employers and their two younger boys are bullies in uniforms, craven and harsh, and infrequently borderline incompetent besides relating to brutalizing unarmed folks. The Russian partisans who present up halfway through the movie demanding meat from the household farm are solely marginally higher: the political righteousness they cite as justification for their actions appears to mere cowl for her thuggish nature. If there wasn’t warfare happening, they’d be bandits robbing vacationers on the street.
That is additionally a refreshingly nonjudgmental movie. Everybody in it appears to be doing the very best they’ll to muddle by a rotten state of affairs that they did not create and are largely powerless to manage (although those with weapons and uniforms get to take refuge in vicious energy fantasies). However, the movie does not excuse anybody, both. Sara continuously struggles to behave morally and ethically in a surrounding place individuals who put these issues on the forefront of their minds have a tendency to finish up in jail or on the incorrect finish of a rifle.
The movie does not a lot finish as cease, like all ordeals. It is torment in cinematic kind, made understandable and engrossing by its give attention to singular expertise, and the efficiency that anchors it. Zuzanna Surowy has by no means acted in a movie earlier, however, she appears as if she’s acquired years of expertise. She has that reward of letting the environment and occasions soak up and replicate her. We actually do really feel as if we’re seeing all of it through her eyes, together with the very worst of it.