Men stagger in the snow. At night, through the forest, they flee. They are fleeing the extreme right, they are fleeing the fall of the Republic, they are fleeing Franco. They flee to France, without knowing what awaits them there. It is February 1939 and what awaits these Catalan Republicans are makeshift camps resembling concentration camps. Among these refugees parked like prisoners is an artist: the cartoonist and caricaturist Josep Bartolí. It is a friendship born in the middle of the barbed wire with him that the former gendarme Serge tells his grandson – showing himself with a sensitivity that takes you to the guts – without sparing him the atrocities perpetrated by his colleagues nor the misery in which the Spaniards flounder.
Aurel, whose real name is Aurélien Froment, could not have done better for his first feature film. The press cartoonist, whose pencil strokes have enamelled the pages of World, from Chained duck or even Marianne, delivers on the big screen all his admiration for the Catalan artist Josep Bartolí and invests this animated film with all his passion for the artist’s work.
The line
Animation, too often summarized in children’s films, returns here to its foundation: the line. The artist-director’s hand extends into the pencil, so it makes sense that the artist’s stroke is the real star of the film. Aurel’s trait of course, but also Bartolí’s trait. Fundamental importance is given to textures and the hand-drawn line. The textures of the different techniques used (chalk, charcoal, pencil, pastel, watercolor, etc.) dance in the image like grain on old film and give an extra soul to each shot.
“Show the drawing like a cry”, declared the director in his note of intent. Its more or less smooth and colorful graphics scale the drama and materialize the subjectivity of the testimony. As a result, Aurel uses all the power of the designer whose sketch transposes what even the most sophisticated of cameras will not be able to capture.
The strength of a drawing does not necessarily come from the abundance of details and Aurel proves it to us here. In Josep, the decorations of the memories take more of the suggestion in order to refocus the attention on the action and the dubbing. Even stronger, even the movements of the characters are reduced to the strict minimum and put the heavy weight of the drama on the power of the line and the dubbing. The actors carry with sensitivity the drawings of Aurel, who inserts his animation in the own drawings of Bartolí and vice versa, until merging the two arts.
The sublime of artistic vision
As the title does not suggest, it is rather the French gendarme who is the main character of the film. Here it is above all a question of his own memories and of what Josep may have told him. However, in a few moments of grace, the point of view of the Catalan designer emerges and brings out the sublime of the artistic vision in the midst of the meanders of decay. We think in particular of the appearance of Frida Kahlo emerging from the waters as a mythological apparition of divine sensuality. The voice actor of Frida, the Catalan singer Sílvia Pérez Cruz, also signs the superb soundtrack of the film carried by the infinite softness of her voice.
Josep is a poignant film which is illustrated by the ferocity of its purpose and the strength of its graphics. French cinephiles can only feel a certain shame at the injustice of the treatment reserved by the French authorities to Spanish exiles. This cracked pearl of violence is a precious tribute to the journey engulfed by the pitfalls of an atypical artist with uncompromising lines.