The Most Valuable of Goods by Michel Hazanavicius, it is the animated film adaptation of a tale by Jean-Claude Grumberg, himself the son of a deportee who died at Auschwitz, a playwright, who has written extensively about the Shoah.
It is winter in Poland, a woodcutter collects a basket, thrown from a death train, a desperate gesture by deported parents, a miracle for this poor woman who lost a young child. Not for her husband, convinced that these people, the Jews, have no heart. But the boorish man lets himself be touched by the baby, it is the journey of a righteous man, who will act as a father for this child.
The animation, the story, is what authorized Michel Hazanavicius to take on the tale of Jean-Claude Grumberg. By the thickness of the line, this journey from darkness towards light, and the voices, the bet is successful.
The voices are those of Dominique Blanc, Grégory Gadebois, Denis Podalydès and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the storyteller. He recorded his score shortly before his death, it's overwhelming to still hear the most beautiful voice of French cinema.
We start from the side of Fréjus in the Var, a town by the sea, often crushed by the sun, but here we are far from the postcard of the Riviera, we are more on the side of the modest inhabitants and their dilapidated buildings. Where Liane, a 19-year-old girl, lives with her mother and her little sister, like all young people her age, she is bored, dreams of fame and luxury, and spends her life on social networks between makeup, cosmetic surgery, designer clothes and perfumes that they can hardly afford.
Liane who will glimpse the light of somewhere else, via a reality TV show, for which she decides to take a casting, unfortunately clinging a little too much to her dream, while real life and its problems continue to take over. the top.
Agathe Riedinger, who studied at the Beaux-Arts, wanted to take the opposite view of what is considered (or not) in good taste, by questioning what reality TV inflicts on women's bodies. If Rough diamond is obviously not free from faults or clumsiness, we believe in it, thanks to the casting, that of Malou Khebizi – who plays Liane – in the lead, and we are touched, by this highlighting of a peripheral, impoverished France, silent but majority, with its language, its codes or its cultural references.
