OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
Two years ago, during a Work in Progress session at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Michel Hazanavicius disclosed twenty minutes of the project he was working on. The film is now completed and is appearing at Cannes in the official competition, of which it is, of the twenty-two in the running, the last to be screened, Friday May 24.
It is therefore an animated film which closes the ban on this 77e edition of the Festival. Genre regularly hosted on the Croisette, in special sessions and in the different categories. Less in the temple which crowns the Palme d’Or. There, the examples can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Most Valuable of Goods represents the fifth, after The Wild Planet (1973), by René Laloux, Shrek 2 (2004), by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004), by Mamoru Oshii, and Waltz with Bashir (2008), by Ari Folman.
The expectation with which the Annecy session left us was not disappointed. The Most Valuable of Goods, a tale by playwright and writer Jean-Claude Grumberg (Seuil, 2019), of which the film is the adaptation, could not have dreamed of a better cinematographic translation than this one. Respectful of the subject, the style, the fine and acerbic spirit of the writer, the film imposes animation as obvious. Hazanavicius, who sketched all the characters and actively participated in the drawing, using the outline to reach the very essence of the story, delivers a statement which cannot tolerate the slightest equivocation.
The story told here is that of a “poor lumberjack”without children, married to a “poor lumberjack”, living in a small house in the middle of a huge forest in Poland. Both try to survive, while everywhere there reigns poverty, hunger, cold and war, the noise of which reaches them only by the railway track used every day by the deportation trains – wagons of death. transporting thousands of Jews to the extermination camps.
On the string
Yet it is life and the greatest happiness that one of them will, one fine day, offer the woodcutter: a baby, thrown out of the window of a convoy, with the hope that it will be saving. The woman does not hesitate and collects it. From now on, she will never stop fighting to raise this little girl who, at first, the husband rejects, on the pretext that she belongs to this “cursed race” which we refer to as the ” heartless “. His heart, however, will end up being softened by the little girl’s coos and laughter. To the point of giving his life to save that of the little “merchandise” (one of the terms used by the Nazis to designate the Jews).
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