When the Holocaust is explained as a fairy tale

During World War II, a poor lumberjack adopts a Jewish girl who has just been thrown by her father from the train deporting the entire family to Auschwitz. Michel Hazanavicius's first animated film strives to strike a precarious balance between the horror of what it's depicting and the fairy-tale tone of the story, aiming to vindicate love and solidarity as intrinsically human qualities. As is typical in the director's work, The artist, is a film with better intentions than results. Despite expressive and deliberately pumiceous 2D animation and some memorable characters (the disfigured-faced ex-soldier who takes in the mother and child), the film cannot avoid, especially in the final stretch, indulging in a sentimentality underscored by Alexandre Desplat's ever-present score.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film are the parallels it allows us to draw with the present and the reflections it generates on how to represent genocide. If the Holocaust has recently been approached in cinema from the conviction that it is impossible to recreate the horror (hence the use of off-screen in The area of interest (or, in this case, an evocative, non-realistic animation), the Palestinian genocide in Gaza is being broadcast live in all its rawness. It's difficult, then, to connect with Hazanavicius's message of human kindness right now, no matter how good his intentions.