‘The Most Precious of Cargoes’ Review: Michel Hazanavicius’ Mawkish Animated Holocaust Fable
The French Oscar winner ('The Artist') premiered his latest, about a Jewish baby abandoned in the woods during World War II, in the main Cannes competition.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s the latest feature by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, who’s been a favorite of the Cannes programmers ever since his cinephile- and crowd-pleasing serio-comic pastiche The Artist (2011) broke him onto the international stage, going on to scoop up awards — including a best picture Oscar — and box-office records (for a near-silent film, at least) worldwide.
If nothing else, The Most Precious of Cargoes will surely live on as a pedagogical tool in schools, able to show kids the horrors of the Holocaust but in an easier-to-digest, less visually traumatic cartoon form — and with a far briefer running time than, say, Claude Lanzmann’s 566-min documentary Shoah.
In the snow-napped landscape, a burly woodcutter (voiced in the French version by Gregory Gadebois) and his wife (Dominique Blanc) live a bare existence, dress in head scarves and wooly coats, and seem like they could be characters from a story set anywhere in the last thousand years.
The wordless sequence in which he pushes the baby out through a hole in the box car is preceded by a montage of the faces in the carriage, each one precisely observed and brought to life through a combination of Hazanavicius’ own character designs and the animation department’s meticulous rendering.
No doubt this project has been in production for a good long while, and means a lot to him given that he’s descended (as am I) from Ashkenazi Jews hailing from the Pale of Settlement, an area that includes what is now parts of Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Ukraine and Russia.
Moreover, he has explored genocides and ethnic cleansing before, as a writer on Passé sous silence, a TV documentary about Rwanda, and as writer-director of his 2014 feature The Search, a remake of Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 post-Holocaust story that Hazanavicius reset in Chechnya in the late 1990s after Russia’s devastating invasion of that country.
The original article contains 1,097 words, the summary contains 312 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
