The Most Precious of Cargoes (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

This is a beautifully realised animation based on the novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg.   With its sombre colours combined with a picture book style it feels in its opening scenes like a Grimm’s fairy tale.  Narrated by the late Jean-Louis Trintignant, it even begins “Once upon a time….”

A  poor peasant woman (Dominique Blanc) is collecting wood in the snow covered forest.  The woman and her husband (Grégory Gadebois) scrape a meagre living as woodcutters. Every day the cargo trains thunder through the forest.  The woman prays for something valuable to be dropped from the train.   She also prays for the baby she longs for.  And one day a baby is thrown from that train.

The setting is Poland in 1943 and we soon discover that this is a bleak but also life affirming story, inspired by one of the cruellest times in our history.  It is indeed a grim tale.

The woman takes the baby to her heart.   But her husband and the other men in their small community realise that his baby must be one of those they term “The Heartless”.  They mean the Jews.   They know what the cargo in those wagons is.  Later this is confirmed when we flash back to the agony of the father (Antonin Maurel),throwing his child out into the snow in the hope that she will somehow survive. 

Banished by her husband to the barn with her baby, the woman finds unexpected help from a neighbour (Denis Podalydès), horribly disfigured in the previous war and now living in bitter solitude.  The grimness of the tale is momentarily lightened with elements such as that and particularly the delight of the initially harsh husband when the child captures his heart.  Though that is soon quashed when his anti-semitic friends discover he is harbouring a Jewish baby.  As a result of their “patriotic” actions, the woman is forced into a cruel odyssey of survival with the child she now loves as her daughter.

The film doesn’t spare us the horrors of Auschwitz.  One of its most moving scenes is at the end of the war, when the child’s father, just released from the camp and now an almost unrecognisable skeleton and the sole survivor of his family, encounters the woman and child waiting in the snow for a train.  Does he realise that little girl is his child?  

While the ironic resolution of the story is a master stroke.

Director Michel Hazanavicius’s best known previous film is the multi-Oscar winning silent move The Artist (2011).   I loved that.  This harsh yet beautiful tale I love even more.