THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
A child in hiding during the Second World War, his father and grandparents murdered in Auschwitz, Jean-Claude Grumberg, born in 1939, had plenty to emerge destroyed from this long and methodical abomination. Instead, he began cutting up fabric, no doubt out of atavism, then replaced the fabric with words. We cannot judge the dresses that left his workshop, but on the other hand we have read his texts, heard his dialogues, chiselled, elegant, bittersweet, with a devastating humor, painful and vitalist at the same time, obsessed by this « chose » which cost him a father, 6 million brothers and sisters, and against whose fate he miraculously remained alive.
The Most Valuable of Goods (published by Seuil in 2019, reissued today with original drawings by Michel Hazanavicius) is the latest of these texts, which adopts an unexpected distance from the event by choosing the form of a cruel tale engaged in the hope. It tells the story of a little girl thrown from a train and taken in by a couple of poor lumberjacks. The title of the work, which turns the Nazi neolanguage like a glove (the “merchandise” designated the Jews destined to the industry of death), is quite illuminating on its spirit. Here, no Jews or Nazis, we speak the language of the story, which evokes “cursed race” or the “train gods”.
Work on the pattern
Alerted by the emotion and the attitude that emanate from this stylized story, seeing in it a means of approaching with the necessary fear and trembling an event to which his family history is no stranger, the director Michel Hazanavicius – the very one who invented the universal antidepressant Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, the hero of OSS 117 – made it into an animated film.
Faithful to the spirit and letter of the text, the film is not only that. He transubstantiates it into the world of animation, with all the sobriety, sensitivity and talent required. Rather than embroidering on the refined narrative of the tale – the found child, the distressing argument of the sterile couple who takes her in, the jealousy and malice of the surrounding world, the death factory, the unexpected return of a miraculous father and unrecognizable – Hazanavicius has the intelligence to work on the motif. They are few in number, but occupy all the space. The Polish forest, dark, disturbing, wintry, and yet saving. The train, like a blind, howling beast that never ceases to cross it and tear the world apart, screaming. The death camp, an elective place of human disfigurement against the backdrop of a transfigured Yiddish lullaby.
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