A band of illiterate woodcutters in an unnamed East European country, sometime during World War 2, rage against the Jews who are being shipped by the trainload to a nearby death camp, cursing them for causing the war and calling them the “Heartless”. But one woodcutter has had the personal experience of putting his hand over a Jewish baby’s heart and has felt her heartbeat pulsating through him. Finally able to take their insults no longer, he rises to his feet and roars, “the Heartless have hearts!” That is all, but in Michel Hazanavicius’s animated drama The Most Precious of Cargoes, it is dramatic statement in which ignorance gives way to human bonding and compassion.
Drawn in the vaguely realistic style of old comic books and populated by a handful of stereotyped stock characters with names like “the Poor Woodcutter” and “the Poor Woodcutter’s Wife”, the film is based on a book by Jean-Claude Grumberg, who has worked on screenplays for such legends as Francois Truffaut and Costa-Gavras. His long experience writing plays for children and young people is keenly felt in The Most Precious of Cargoes and suggests the film might find its main audience in schools, where it would be a marvelous teaching tool.
Its premiere in competition at Cannes seemed a little much for such a simple, direct work that offers no new insights on the horrors of the German concentration camps, in the way, for example, that Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 Cannes Grand Prix winner Zone of Interest shocked audiences with its unexpectedly “normal” approach to the private life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss. Cargoes does not even push the pedal to the floor on its Brothers Grimm fairy tale structure, which certainly promises a much richer subtext than we get. The result is a film hard to stay interested in, as Alexandre Desplat’s orchestral score sweeps through forest scenes of cold, hunger, poverty and misery one howling war-stricken winter.
A fire-breathing train blows its whistle and bursts through the heavily falling snow. Later, a flashback takes us inside one of the cattle cars packed with anxious human beings, among whom are a young couple with twin babies. In a moment of desperate lucidity, the father glimpses a peasant woman in the snow and throws one of his children out the window. The scene takes place wordlessly over music and sound effects, communicating only through the mother’s open-mouth scream and the fear and horror in the other passenger’s eyes.
When the train reaches the death camp, we see very little after the father and mother are separated. The last we see of the woman, she is still carrying her remaining child. The doomed despair on the father’s face is eloquent enough. The most graphic scene comes much later in the film: two emaciated prisoners toss skeleton bodies into a pile off screen; then a fearsome montage of skulls brings home both the number of dead and their suffering.
These terrible scenes, however, are few in number and secondary to the main story about how the Woodcutter’s Wife (voiced by a patient, stubborn Dominique Blanc), who longs for a child, finds the baby in the snow and raises it, at first against her husband’s wishes; then both fall in love with the happy, gurgling little girl. As events come to a head with the other woodcutters, the wife and baby find shelter with a fierce hermit who has lost half his face in “the other war”, always moving on to survive.
The film is bracketed with Jean-Louis Trintignant’s wise introduction and conclusion as the offscreen narrator, who pops up a few more times with his light touch, ironizing on what is truth: did none of this happen, as some people say? Or is what we see on the screen the truth? That warning to Holocaust deniers makes a strong statement in an ending that is both touching and sentimental.
Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Screenplay: Michel Hazanavicius, Jean-Claude Grumberg, based on Grumberg’s novel
Producers: Florence Gastaud, Robert Guédiguian, Michel Hazanavicius, Riad Sattouf, Patrick Sobelman
Voice cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Blanc, Grégory Gadebois, Denis Podalydes
Animation: Julien Grande
Editing: Laurent Pelé-Piovani
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Sound: Jean-Paul Hurier, Selim Azzazi
Production companies:
World Sales: Studio Canal
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
81 minutes
