“The Most Precious of Goods”, Michel Hazanavicius between swaddling clothes and demons – Libération

The Oscar-winning director's animated film, about a baby survivor of the Shoah, is being surpassed.

Floating on the little cloud of Oscars after The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius launched a major anti-war film in 2014, The Search, shipwreck brimming with pathos in the rubble of forgotten Chechnya. Ten years later, after having done his best, the filmmaker returns to the sound of boots that we prefer to keep at bay, to peoples massacred while the world looks elsewhere, this time approaching the Shoah. Tense silence.

With the Most Precious of Goods, adaptation of a novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg, Hazanavicius multiplies the biases. First there is the medium of the animated film, which establishes a distance, allows us to embody things differently through its natural allegorical quality. A first effect of distancing reinforced by the choice to place the story in the register of the tale, since the places like the characters are reduced to their simplest expression: “Once upon a time, in a big wood, there lived a poor woodcutter and a poor woodcutter.” The man is gruff, the woman maternal. Not far from their home, a human freight train passes from which, one early morning, a newborn baby is thrown. A “heartless”, that they collect and protect against all.

It has some wiring from Auschwitz

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