The Most Precious Goods in Cinema, the series That’s Paris, a book by Gabriella Zalapi… Madame Figaro’s culture week

The fairest of tales

Michel Hazanavicius has a taste for challenge. After the Z series (Cut), the black and white silent film (The Artist), the spy parody (OSS 117) or the Nouvelle Vague column (The Redoubtable)he tackles the drawn tale by adapting The Most Valuable of Goodsbook by Jean-Claude Grumberg. A classic fable with a historical dimension and refined style, his animated film is anchored in Poland during the Second World War. A poor lumberjack, elderly and childless, picks up merchandise that has fallen from a train. “Food”, she thinks before understanding that it is a baby: the little girl was thrown from a convoy of deportees, from a death train. Despite the reluctance of her anti-Semitic husband, the woman raises the child as her own by trading goat’s milk to her neighbor, an ex-soldier with a dented head. Everyone is attached to this little girl whose innocence sweeps aside hatred and prejudice in favor of the purest of feelings. A moving and transgenerational film which fights with grace and sensitivity against forgetting and respects the spirit and purpose of the original work, an edition of which illustrated by Michel Hazanavicius is now available at Seuil. M. L.

The Most Valuable of Goodsby Michel Hazanavicius.

This is Paris, cabaret life

Behind This is Paristhe flagship series of France 2, hide the producers of Ten percent . It is no longer a question here of the behind the scenes of French cinema but of those of a Parisian cabaret, Le Tout-Paris. At the head of this old institution, Gaspard Berthille has no other choice but to sell the family establishment. The time of crazy Parisian nights is long gone and the magazines no longer attract many people. Unless the rich Jacques Baudry invests to help him create a new show. His only condition? That we hire his son, an artistic director interned in a psychiatric hospital… With This is Parisdirector Marc Fitoussi succeeds in immersing the viewer in a seemingly outdated universe by modernizing it with a fine cast. Alex Lutz turns out to be extremely touching as the persevering owner who clings to his childhood dreams, Nicolas Maury (the unforgettable Hervé in Ten percent) shines as a genius for whimsical staging and Monica Bellucci reveals an irresistible comic side as an apprentice revue dancer. Added to this solid trio, Anne Marivin, Charlotte de Turckheim, Dominique Besnehard, Salomé Dewaels… M. G.

This is Pariscreated by Marc Fitoussi, Edgard F. Grima and Jérôme Bruno, with Alex Lutz, Nicolas Maury, Monica Bellucci… From November 27 on France 2 and france.tv

A funny childhood

Grand Prize for the heroine Madame Figaro for her first novel, Antoniawhich told the story of the emancipation of a woman married without love to a bourgeois from Palermo in the 1960s, the writer and visual artist Gabriella Zalapi follows in Ilaria a child that her father trapped in Northern Italy in the 1980s. One day after school, the little girl, who was waiting for her sister, was surprised to see her father appear, who assured that a family lunch is planned. The lunch will last two years: the father begins a long wandering with the child, from autogrills and motorway rest areas to shabby hotels, and Ilaria watches his charming acts in front of strangers, when she does not become an accomplice despite herself of lost and found scams, which he sets up while claiming that they are games. This father, like a “nervous cheetah”, takes her to Trieste and Bologna, leaves her to board with the sisters, then abandons her to her grandmother who, herself, drops her off with a friend – an authentic princess ! – thanks to which Ilaria will discover the sun, the Sicilian countryside and joy. He considers her as baggage with which he does not know what to do, but which he cannot and does not want to abandon because it would mean renouncing the one he continues to love – the absent one, Ilaria’s mother… With virtuosity which is due to its simplicity, its short and precise sentence, the author allows us to see the violence and the inadequacies of adults from a child’s perspective. An initiatory novel of great sensitivity and sensoriality, a journey both hard and gentle, where a little girl’s capacity for wonder happily survives sadness, fears and pangs of heart. M. T. H.