Review: The Most Precious of Cargoes brings a warm heart to a cold world

There's a recent trend in animation that I find pretty exciting: Best Director Oscar winners who traditionally make live-action movies making a jump to the animated world. Guillermo del Toro's stunning adaptation of Pinocchio won the Oscar. Bong Joon-ho's next project after Mickey 17 is an animated film that is the most expensive production in Korean history. And this year, Michel Hazanavicius, who won his Oscar for The Artist more than a decade ago, brings us the supremely moving adaptation of Jean-Claude Grumberg's novel, The Most Precious of Cargoes. 

The film had its North American premiere last night at The American French Film Festival in Los Angeles, following its world premiere at Cannes (where it was the first animated film to compete for the Palme d'Or since Waltz with Bashir) and opening night slot at Annecy. The screening drew a nice crowd, and the Q&A that followed with Hazanavicius proved illuminating and surprising.

The film, set during the Holocaust, frames itself as a fairy tale, but at the same time, pits itself against the usual expectations of such stories. There's a quiet magical element thrumming underneath the surface -- the sylvan setting certainly helps -- but the story is grounded and, as you might expect, quite bleak. The narration by the late legend Jean-Louis Trintignant, in his final film role, introduces us to the Poor Woodcutter and his wife, who live a quiet life deep in the forest, managing to scrape by in the harsh winter months. The wife regularly makes her way out to the train tracks, where she sees each passing train as a herald from civilization, a connection to the wider world, and even a gracious god. She prays to the trains to drop some cargo that might be of use -- something warm, something edible, something to bring a little excitement to her life of quiet drudgery. What she gets is something much more special, but also much more dangerous: a baby that is thrown from the train, whom the Poor Woodcutter's Wife sees as the best gift she could've hoped for, but probably wouldn't have dared to ask for.

She and her husband had a child who died, so the baby's arrival feels like serendipity to her. She doesn't even really question the why. But her husband knows immediately what it means for them. Like his fellow woodcutters, her has deeply-held Anti-semitic beliefs, and he knows what those trains actually carry: Jews on the way to concentration camps. He refers to Jews as "the Heartless" and promptly banishes his wife, and the little girl, to sleep in the barn. Not under his roof.

The story is a simple and affecting one, and in some regards, feels like a return to silence on Hazanavicius's part. In the Q&A, he talked about always going the silent route when possible, because that's where you find deeper emotion. That's certainly true here. All of the characters are people of few words, often conveying more with a grunt or a glance than anything they say. This is where Alexandre Desplat's score comes in. The celebrated composer delivers some of his most beautiful work ever here, and it does so much heavy lifting in deepening our understanding of these characters, and moving the story along. As the Poor Woodcutter's heart begins to soften, and his worldview begins to crack, it's Desplat's music that helps to bring us inside that process, and to understand those feelings. It's magnificent work, and so moving.

The animation style is really striking, as well. From the trailer and images I'd seen, I wasn't sure if I would really like the animation, but my fears were quickly put to rest. This is so visually stunning, and doesn't really look like any other movie I've seen. The characters are drawn with such thick, heavy lines, looking like they're wood carvings themselves, or like they've stepped out of old paintings. There's a weight to them, that speaks both to the realities of their tough existence out in the wilderness, and the moral quandry they find themselves in. 

The winter scenes (which make up about the first half of the film or so) are particularly effective, too. The sky dense with huge fluffy flakes, the styrofoam squelch of the snow as the characters trudge through, the endless blinding white. It's enough to make you shiver in your seat.

The film unfortunately makes some narrative missteps. After quite a bit, we're introduced to a new character: the baby's father who threw her through the train window. After we meet him, we skip back to him occasionally, seeing him entering the camp and facing the various inhumane indignities and horrors there. Obviously, this is pertinent to the story, intertwined, but for me, he was introduced too late, which made those scenes feel almost like a distraction from the main story. I kept thinking, "But we understand where he was going, and what he was going to face there." It almost feels redundant. It certainly affects the momentum of the story. I wish he were introduced earlier, or featured less, because the pieces don't fit so well as is.

But that's my main quibble with what is otherwise a pretty remarkable movie. And the way it was made it rather strange. Hazanavicius talked about filming a rough live-action version of the film in the woods near Paris (complete with joggers passing through the background of some shots). He made this to help figure out the flow of the film, to aid in the editing. He says the live-action version, despite its strangeness, is still emotionally effective. Hopefully it's be released someday (the moderator suggested it could make a great extra on the Blu-ray release).

Weirdly, though, none of the footage was used for rotoscoping. Indeed, he said the footage wasn't even really used as a reference for the animators. The animators also had access to the voice performances of the actors, which were then re-recorded after the animation was done, to match the footage. Basically, Hazanavicius said he was lucky to be coming into the world of animation without knowing what he was doing, because he was able to break some "rules" and come out on the other side with a film to be proud of.

And ultimately, unfortunately, this story is a timely one. I wish we could become a world where stories like this feel more like historical relics than urgent reflections of our present. But that is not the world we live in. The Most Precious of Cargoes is a call for radical empathy, for seeing the humanity of people who are different than us and loving them all the same. In the film's closing moments, Trintignant's narrator reflects on Holocaust denialism, how while this story is a fairy tale, the historical backdrop it takes place against is not. It echoes today while we watch genocide being carried out against Palestinians, and so many people turning a blind eye and an uncaring heart that way, denying it's genocide, denying their complicity. Those stories reverberated through my brain as this movie ended, and made me long for more people to adopt the attitude of the Poor Woodcutter's Wife, who saw someone in need and extended her hand without hesitation, even with excitement. If only we were all so quick to care.