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‘The Most Precious of Cargoes’ Review: An Animated Fable from the Director of ‘The Artist’ Finds Hope in the Holocaust
Michel Hazanavicius' hand-drawn 'The Most Precious of Cargoes' follows the life of a Jewish baby thrown from the window of a death-camp train.
The main characters here are a poor Polish woodcutter (gruffly voiced in French by Grégory Gadeois) and his wife (Dominique Blanc), simple peasants who harbor antisemitic thoughts without ever speaking the word “Jew.” Over the course of the film, they come to learn (in the woodcutter’s words) that “the Heartless have a heart.” And lest the weight of the material escape a soul, Hazanavicius steers the project into more overtly historical territory in the final stretch, offering haunting images of scared figures huddled on trains and piled in mass graves. The compositions are unexpectedly austere at times, sharing more in common with William Blake’s more tortured engravings than with the plaintive cat from DreamWorks’ “Puss in Boots.” But there’s heart to the human characters’ behavior, as when the woman barters the baby’s shawl for a cup of goat’s milk from an ornery neighbor (Denis Podalydès), a veteran of the Great War whose face was disfigured by shrapnel. Movingly scored by Alexandre Desplat, the tight, 80-minute project isn’t based in fact, à la Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” but it elicits many of the same feelings.
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