The Most Precious of Cargoes review: “fairytales and the Holocaust can coexist” - The Jewish Chronicle

Conventional wisdom would say that fairytales and the Holocaust should not co-exist. Yet this animated adaptation of the French short story by novelist and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg is proof that there should be no rules when it comes to storytelling, and especially to finding new ways to oppose those how deny the Holocaust existed.

Yet it probably helps that for his first animated feature acclaimed director Michel Hazanavicius, who is best known for the Oscar-winning silent movie The Artist, was not motivated by a sense of duty to never forget. Rather his every decision relating to the way his film unfolds is rooted in a finely tuned sensibility whose priority is tell an excellent story as beautifully as possible.

Beginning with “Once upon a time…” this is this tale of a crushingly poor woodcutter’s wife who prays to the “god” of the train that regularly cuts through the forest where she forages for wood that something might one day drop from one of its livestock carriages that will relieve her poverty.

The husband believes those who killed Christ have no heart until in an unexpected moment he feels the baby’s heart beating like a drum under his huge gnarled hand

The prayer is answered in the form of a baby who lands in a snow drift wrapped in a tallit. Blinded by a blizzard she follows its cries until she scoops it back to her log-built home. Thereafter the story documents the gruff illiterate husband’s softening attitude towards the infant. For him, any child from one of the trains is the spawn of a Jew, a people he and his fellow woodcutters only refer to as The Heartless.

This is no metaphor. The husband believes those who killed Christ have no heart until in an unexpected moment he feels the baby’s heart beating like a drum under his huge gnarled hand.

If the story thus far seems predictable there is still much for the eye to feast on. The people, flora and fauna of the forest are outlined in thick black lines as if the animators were working with woodcut images made by the woodcutter himself. Yet it is the remarkable reach of this story that makes this film exceptional.

Every time we feel comforted by the baby’s survival the trains remind us of the continuing horror at the end of tracks. Audaciously the action vaults further to inside the carriages and to Auschwitz itself. Most ambitiously of all the tale takes us into peaceful post-war Europe, a narrative vault I have not seen since Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s remarkable play Our Class – also set in Poland – which premiered at the National Theatre in 2009.

It should be noted that unlike the true story of that play this film differs in that fiction has been attached to the fact of Auschwitz. But in both horror and humanity co-exist.

Those who previously encountered Grumberg’s story as a reading performed by Samantha Spiro at the Marylebone Theatre last year will still get much out of this new telling. Those who didn’t have the full treat in store.

The Most Precious
of Cargoes
Certificate 12a

★★★★★

Topics:

Film