Directed by Michel Hazanavicius, this postmodern Holocaust fairytale premiered at Cannes last year, and turns out to be a dreamy animated curiosity which is certainly different to the icy realist rigour of other films which have appeared there on the same theme, such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest or László Nemes’s Son of Saul. It is adapted from a novella by author and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg (who collaborated with Truffaut on The Last Metro), whose own father was murdered in the Nazi death camps.
The late Jean-Louis Trintignant has his final credit as the narrator, introducing us to scenes that could, at first glance, be from the Brothers Grimm. We see a dense central European forest … which a second world war Nazi train is seen speeding through, carrying terrified Jews to Auschwitz. One man, with a wife, young child and a baby makes a desperate decision to throw his baby out on to the snowy hillside in the hope that someone finds it – and someone does.
A poor woodcutter’s wife (voiced by Dominique Blanc), in agony after the death of her own child, rescues the baby and brings it home where her grumpy old husband (voiced by Grégory Gadebois) is initially suspicious and filled with antisemitic loathing, having evidently guessed what has happened. (The plausibility of his having guessed this is perhaps the least of the film’s narrative issues.) But just as his old heart is melted by the adorable baby, the anti-Semites close in.
The movie is topped off by a twist-ending postwar coda whose enigmatic quality the film whimsically complicates by getting the narrator to announce that yes, this is fiction, and far-fetched fiction at that, but there are plenty of deniers out there who claim that the Holocaust is fiction as well. It’s a strange, muddled equivalence and an odd juxtaposition. The existence of Holocaust deniers does not itself justify a fiction contrived around the Holocaust. This is a rather sentimental bucolic tale, featuring sweet little cartoon birds and rabbits – and the real horror of Nazi death camps. Yet the rebuke to the fascists is sincere enough.
• The Most Precious of Cargoes is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 April.
