We can think what we want about Michel Hazanavicius, but we have to admit that the filmmaker likes to take risks by dabbling in a new genre each time. After The Artistwhich paid homage to the silent cinema of the 1920s, The Redoubtablewho painted a vitriolic portrait of Jean-Luc Godard, and Cut!which took up the codes of the horror comedy of zombies, Hazanavicius is now trying his hand at a children’s tale through a first animated film, The Most Valuable of Goodscurrently in our theaters.
A praise of self-giving and sacrifice
Even before the original and homonym book by Jean-Claude Grumberg was published in 2019, producer Patrick Sobelman and Studiocanal approached the filmmaker to ask him to bring to the screen this poignant story of a poverty-stricken couple of Polish lumberjacks. taking an abandoned child into their home. A baby thrown from the train taking her to Auschwitz, by a desperate Jewish father, determined to save his daughter from certain death. Coming to fill the emotional void of the woodcutter, the child will then very quickly become a source of conflicts, first between the spouses – the husband being far from having the Jews in his heart – then between the household and the local peasants … So, many lives will be turned upside down, sometimes in a tragic way, in order to protect the little one.
A story of a rescue that involves the lives and consciences of those who dedicate themselves to it, the film praises self-giving and sacrifice, for a child certainly, but also by virtue of a higher moral principle, a duty of humanity at a time when Europe at war is seeing its sons fall by the hundreds of thousands.
The horror behind the apparent innocence
While, in the book, the father’s story develops in parallel with that of the lumberjacks, Hazanavicius’ film chooses to deal with the second first, as if to initially create a false innocence, specific to the tales for children, which the various adventures will subsequently continue to undermine. Thus, the baby reveals himself not to be the gift of the stork nor the future prophet of the Exodus but a survivor of the holocaust that the father’s story, in perfect counterpoint, allows us to evoke in a cryptic way. We note, in passing, the modesty with which Hazanavicius chooses to represent the horror, through a series of dark shots with multiple skeletal faces, distorted by terror and suffering – we obviously think of the Cri d’Edvard Munch.
An aesthetic success
Rather agreed in its general purpose and its narrative evolution, The Most Valuable of Goods stands out above all for his aesthetic work. An accomplished artist and designer in his spare time, the filmmaker himself sketched the images for his film and, to do so, drew his inspiration from the prints of the illustrator Henri Rivière, one of the most renowned figures of Japonism. in France. The result is a visually magnificent work – contrasting with the harshness of the story –, narrated by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant and carried by the singular voices of Dominique Blanc and Grégory Gadebois. We recommend!
3 stars out of 5
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