La plus précieuse des marchandises. The review

Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who lived with his wife in a house in the woods, near the railway. Michel Hazanavicius’ first animated feature film, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jean-Claude Grumberg, begins with the incipit of a fairy tale. A film that brings animated cinema back into competition in the main section of Cannes since 2008, when another film about war, Waltz with Bashir, was well received and went on to win a Golden Globe for best foreign film. One day, while the snow was falling and a cold wind was blowing, the poor woodcutter’s wife heard a noise, and then a cry. She found a bundle, and inside her, cold and scared, was a little girl. That little girl, mistaken by her for a gift from the God of the train, was in reality a Jewish baby thrown from a carriage moving towards Auschwitz by a desperate father. The war and the horror are returned in an echo, the incessant passage of the wagons towards the concentration camps, the eerie omen of a whistle in the night, the smoke of the locomotive which evokes the image of the crematorium ovens. An area of ​​interest, consumed by hunger and infested by anti-Semitic propaganda, the canards about the Jews as killers of Christ, contemptuously called heartless, blood drinkers, the conspiracy theories relaunched periodically, and which even today find space as a repercussion of the Israeli conflict Palestinian. Because war generates hatred and fuels it.

Hazanavicius returns to one of his youthful passions, drawing, taking care of the preliminary phase of the character design and the theme of the Holocaust already addressed in The Search. An almost silent film, a method already experimented with The Artist, excluding the minimal lines of dialogue recited by the actors of the Comédie-Française and the brief interventions by an excellent narrator, that of Jean-Louis Trintignant. The tables and the sound design have already isolated, great visual force. The distrust and joy of the little girl’s arrival, the winter and the spring, the bodies crushed on the freight wagons, thrown into the ditches, the families divided upon arrival, the end of the war, the audiovisual ensemble is a sad and emotional tale about life, love and death. And an end designed to respect the premises, they survived, certainly not happily ever after, changed and consumed by history and a destiny to be rebuilt on the bones, to transform the nightmare into a new fairy tale to tell to the grandchildren.

La plus précieuse des marchandises it is a generous film, with a small budget, with vaguely Disney-inspired graphics, clean and full of transparencies, which makes excellent use of depth of field, the endless desolation and the affection captured in the foreground. Delicate, profound, it sows hope, takes up the light of a fireplace to warm the night, and tries to find the heartbeat, silent and hidden by fear.