The Most Precious Of Cargoes Review
Animation’s golden age continues. After the tightest of races for the Oscar, one that culminated in the trophy going to an exquisite creation that rejoiced in its low budget, this week sees an established director making the move to this most multifaceted of film mediums. And in The Most Precious Of Cargoes, Michel Hazanavicius also takes on perhaps the darkest of periods in modern history. The Holocaust.
In the depths of winter during WWII, a woodcutter and his wife eke out a living in a vast forest dissected by a railway line. The couple doesn’t know that it leads to a concentration camp, focusing instead on surviving the harsh conditions. Their marriage is childless, the wife desperately wants a baby and, as the train roars past her one day, it’s as if her prayers have been answered. In the snow, she finds a baby wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl and, despite her husband’s immediate prejudice, adopts the little girl as their own. Over time, the woodcutter becomes more fatherly, but the secret about the child’s heritage leaks out and puts the family in danger. Meanwhile, the trains continue to transport increasing numbers of people to the concentration camps.
MORE: CHECK OUT OUR EXCLUSIVE CHAT WITH THE FILM’S DIRECTOR, MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS, HERE!
Best known for his Oscar winning silent movie The Artist (2011), Hazanavicius ventures into new territory with The Most Precious Of Cargoes yet also keeps one foot on more familiar ground. His personal trademark, silence, not only features strongly in this latest offering but is also used to huge effect. In a film where the dialogue is already sparse, moments of heightened emotion are depicted in agonising silence, allowing the audience to imagine the sound for themselves. Most memorable is when the father takes the harrowing decision to throw the baby out of the train into the snow, and the mother screams at him. But we never hear it. It’s replaced by the terror in her face and her wide open mouth. The sound design generally is excellent, particularly in the opening scenes when it recreates that unique soft crunch that goes with walking through deep snow, and the hand drawn animation itself is so delicate you can almost touch the snowflakes drifting from the sky.
Its monochrome tones perfectly capture the atmosphere and bone-chilling cold, but there are times when its Japanese influence is overpowering: thick black lines distort shapes, and some of that initial subtlety is lost, but the style comes into its own during the scenes in the concentration camp. Hazanavicius doesn’t hold back in his depiction of the horrors, and the combination of the father’s sunken features (reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream) and a montage of silent faces in agony gives the sequence all the power it needs. Yet, for all the cruelty and devastation, this is a film about hope and love, one that shows how hearts can be changed, how far people will go for the ones they hold dear, and how they can overcome the darker forces in the world.
It’s tempting to regard The Most Precious Of Cargoes as a fairytale, but we’re guided away from that right from the start, thanks to a beautifully delivered narration from Jean-Louis Trintingnant. His occasionally mischievous tone is so intimate, he could be sat next to you in the cinema, whispering his commentary in your ear. The film, and the original book of the same name by Jean Claude Grumberg, is a fable in the widest sense of the word, a succinct story with a moral delivered with emotional power and artistic talent. It’s impossible not to be moved.
★★★★
In UK cinemas on April 4th / The voices of Dominique Blanc, Gregory Gadebois, Denis Polyades, Jean-Louis Trintingnant, Antonin Maurel / Dir: Michel Hazanavicius / StudioCanal / 12A
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