Fugitive Pieces

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Delicate and beautiful film about conquering the paralysing effects of grief.

For a film so saturated in a sense of inconsolable loss, this adaptation of the Orange Prize-winning novel by Canadian Anne Michaels is remarkably understated.

It may be tempting to turn away from it as "another Holocaust story" but it's actually both more and less than that.

It touches only briefly - and not very explicitly - on the day when the 9-year-old protagonist, Jakob, loses his entire Polish-Jewish family to Nazi thugs. For most of its length, it's a restrained and emotionally intelligent meditation on the difficulty of coming to terms with a traumatic past.

Jakob, wide-eyed and almost mute in Kay's frighteningly contained performance, is rescued and adopted by Greek archaeologist Athos Roussos (Sherbedgia), and the pair later emigrate to Canada, where the boy grows into a writer.

But his history has an iron grip. Having not actually seen his beloved sister Bella die, he is haunted by her fate and as a result he cannot wholly be in the world he inhabits. "To live with ghosts requires solitude," he muses in a voiceover and when he marries the pretty, joyful Alex (Pike) he finds himself faintly repelled by what he calls her "shameless vitality".

It sounds like the horror-inflected story of a sadsack, but it isn't: writer-director Podeswa (who, like Jakob, was a lone-child survivor of the Holocaust) creates a beautifully seamless narrative in which past and present elide in a constant ebb and flow.

Dillane, who so movingly played Leonard Woolf in

The Hours

, creates a character of almost unbearable lightness as the adult Jakob: his sparkling eyes and bright smile seem to add to rather than subtract from his sadness and it's impossible to take your eyes off him. His redemption, when it comes, is tentative, uncertain - and completely plausible.

Michaels, the author of the source novel, is primarily a poet and this is a film imbued with a distinctly poetic sensibility. It is also ravishing to look at - some of the scenes might have been shot by Caravaggio. But pre-eminently it is a film about being human, about the importance of living in the present, no matter how appalling our memories.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Stephen Dillane, Rade Sherbedgia, Rosamund Pike, Ayelet Zurer, Robbie Kay, Ed Stoppard, Rachelle Lefevre

Director:

Jeremy Podeswa

Running time:

106 mins

Rating:

M (contains violence and sex scenes)