The Most Precious of Cargoes

Michel Hazanavicius won an Academy Award for The Artist and has since made spy spoofs, a Godard biopic and a zombie comedy. His adaptation of Jean-Claude Grumberg's short novel is the first animated film to compete for the Palme d'Or in more than a decade, and the tonal distance from the rest of his filmography could hardly be greater.

A woodcutter and his wife live in a forest somewhere in occupied Poland. They have nothing and no children. Trains cross the forest, and the wife has taken to watching them, until one day something is dropped from a wagon into the snow. Grumberg wrote the book late in life; his own father was deported and never came back, and the story is told in the register of a folk tale, with the narration read by Jean-Louis Trintignant in the last recording he made before his death.

Hazanavicius animates it in charcoal-toned two-dimensional drawing, cold blues and greys against black trees, with Alexandre Desplat's score carrying much of the weight. The Cannes reception was divided — some found the fairy-tale framing an evasion, others thought it the only bearable way to approach the material — and the argument is worth having. What is not in doubt is the film's central proposition, which is Grumberg's: that the deportations were witnessed, continuously, by ordinary people standing in the trees.