An extraordinary feat of animation that offers perspectives from the heart – and heartless – amid the horrors of the Holocaust
We are deep in a forest during wartime, a world of grinding poverty, cold and hunger. An ageing woodcutter’s wife is stumbling through the snow to find wood. Her husband is glad they don’t have another mouth to feed, but she is distraught to have no living children, and desperately hopes that one of the passing trains will drop off some of its “excess cargo” and bring her something new to eat or wear.
One day, she gets an unexpected “gift from the Gods of the train” – in the form of a baby wrapped in a blue and white prayer shawl trimmed with gold. Though she is thrilled, her husband is convinced that the little girl must be one of “The Heartless”, the thieving, Christ-killing and well-poisoning swine he has long been warned against.
Yet the morose woodcutter, initially just a figure of unreflective, almost brutish physical strength, comes to realise that “The Heartless have a heart”. Much against his will, he begins to love the little girl, turns a knot of wood into a spinning ballerina and even proves willing to die defending her. And the viewer, of course, comes to understand that even a seemingly heartless, ignorant antisemite can have a heart too.
Michel Hazanavicius’s remarkable animated feature film is based on Jean-Claude Grumberg's rather self-conscious 2019 novella, The Most Precious of Cargoes: A Fable of the Holocaust. We discover that the baby has been thrown from a train on the way to a death camp by a father desperate to keep at least one member of his family alive. So this is a story of the redemptive power of parental love set against a backdrop of the most heinous atrocities.
If this sounds slightly uncomfortable, it is hard not to be won over by the sheer variety and dazzling skill of the animation. We are never left in any doubt about the horrors of the Holocaust, whether through images of the anguished deportees on the train, a slow motion sequence of their arrival at the camp (with a poignant Yiddish lullaby on the soundtrack) or a montage of distorted screaming faces, almost turned into skulls, to memorialise the dead. Meanwhile, the woodcutter, his wife and the reclusive battle-scarred veteran from whom she seeks goat’s milk to nourish the baby emerge from the forest as huge archetypal figures, like woodcuts in a 19th-century book of fairytales. And the spitting, hiccuping, giggling, tottering baby herself is both touching and utterly convincing.
The Most Precious of Cargoes ends with a coda in yet another style. The baby's surviving father, though still haunted by the relatives he has lost, has now become a distinguished pediatrician. We find him en route to a conference from France to Eastern Europe to talk about his work, when he spots a photograph in a state-sponsored magazine of a girl who has become a socialist pioneer despite being brought up by a poor woodcutter’s wife. Virtuosic sequences recreate in minute detail the crowded railway stations at both ends of his journey. Hazanavicius, who won Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards for The Artist (2011), is a formidable talent. His new film is a monument to both his artistic tact and extraordinary technical skill.
By Matthew Reisz
The Most Precious of Cargoes is out now. studiocanal.com