He had thought he would never make a film about the Shoah. Michel Hazanavicius changed his mind after reading The Most Valuable of Goods by Jean-Claude Grumberg, published by Editions du Seuil. “The extremely rare emotional power of this tale offered all the elements to make a film. It allowed us to reveal the best in human beings while evoking the worst that they did,” he confides.
A couple of Russian lumberjacks take in a baby thrown from a “death convoy” by his deported father. This animated feature film discovered in Cannes where it won the Positive Cinema prize, then in Annecy, can appeal to the whole family. Jean-Louis Trintignant, for his last performance, Dominique Blanc, Grégory Gadebois and Denis Podalydès bring their vocal talents to this major film. Alexandre Desplats adds to the strength of the story with one of his best scores.
A multiplication of talents
These talents put themselves at the service of a story of overwhelming simplicity. The director pays tribute to the Righteous who saved Jews from deportation. Its delicate approach confirms that, as Guillermo Del Toro regularly insists, animation is cinema in its own right. “I made a film. Point, insists Michel Hazanavicius. And it happens to be animation. As with any film, I arranged visual and sound elements to provoke emotions. »
The force that emerges from this story is intense but subdued so as not to traumatize the young audience. Deliberately literary dialogues and silences rich in meaning make it understood without detailing the horror from which the little heroine escapes. “Touching the unspeakable through drawing was a proposal that allowed us to approach its representation with dignity while sticking to the imagination of a tale,” specifies the director.
Remarkable aesthetics
Michel Hazanavicius, a talented designer in his spare time, participated in the design of the film. He helped characterize the characters and also contributed to the development of some of the settings. “I have a very intimate relationship with drawing and I never thought I would one day make a business out of it. However, I would like to point out that the film's graphics were the subject of collective work,” he comments modestly. He particularly highlights the contribution of animation director Julien Grande on whom he was able to rely to bring the book to life.
The director drew inspiration from various sources to give his film an original aesthetic of shattering beauty. He thought of the first Disney studio films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but also to 19th century painting and the paintings of Henri Rivière (1864-1951). The scenes in the wilderness contrast with the intimacy of heroes whose feelings we share. Michel Hazanavicius' first foray into the field of animation makes The Most Valuable of Goods a major success both for its humanist message and for its visual beauty.
