Jean-Louis Trintignant will make a last vocal appearance in the next film by Michel Hazanavicius. He plays the role of narrator in this feature film on the Holocaust, adapted from Jean-Claude Grumberg.
Jean-Louis Trintignant’s singular timbre was instantly recognizable. It is by his voice that the actor with 120 roles, who died on June 17, will title his bow to cinema spectators.
As revealed by various media present at the Annecy Animation Film Festival, Jean-Louis Trintignant had participated in the production of a particularly anticipated animated feature film, the first directed by Michel Hazanavicius, recently in the news with the zombie comedy Coupez!, opening the Cannes Film Festival. This film is titled The Most Precious of Goods, as is the book from which it is adapted, the book by Jean-Claude Grumberg, published in 2019, on the Shoah.
The plot goes like this: Once upon a time there was a poor lumberjack and a poor lumberjack who lived deep in a Polish forest. Poor woodcutter lamented not having children. Once upon a time there was a Jewish family, two newborn twins and their parents, who were arrested in Paris and then deported to the Auschwitz camp. In the train that took them to certain death, the father made a foolish gesture. In a last and ridiculous hope, he threw one of his twins out of the train. One day when a poor lumberjack was watching a train pass which she believed to be freight, a package was ejected and fell in the snow. Like a gift from heaven, this little merchandise turned out to be the one she had been waiting for with so much fervor. A child.
Jean-Louis Trintignant will be the narrator. The voice cast of this animated film will also be made up of Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Blanc and Denis Podalydès. As Michel Hazanavicius pointed out, via BFM TVyou shouldn’t expect to hear much of these voices: “It will be a film with very little dialogue“, warned the filmmaker. The soundtrack was also entrusted to the great composer of music for the image, Alexandre Desplat.
The release date of The Most Precious of Commodities is not yet known.