Film review: Josep animates the true story of an artist who fled Franco Spain to French internment
Streaming at Rendez-Vous, story of artist Josep Bartoli maintains a moral clarity
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Josep streams at the Rendez-Vous French Film Festival until February 14
FLEEING FRANCO’s Spain in 1939, Catalan artist Josep Bartoli found himself along with other Republicans in a French concentration camp notably short on liberté, égalité, or fraternité.
This was the reward for fighting fascism in their homeland: to be starved and brutalized on the other side of the border. Bartoli maintained his sanity by drawing the scenes of suffering around him, while clinging to a portrait of his wife, Maria, lost somewhere in the fray and carrying his child.
This is the grim backdrop to Josep, related decades later in the film by an ageing guard to his grandson. Sympathetic to the refugees, he quietly befriended and traded blunt talk with Bartoli (voiced by gravelly Sergí Lopez), eventually going out of his way to help the stricken artist in the search for his wife.
Years later the two men reunite in Mexico, whereupon we visit the scene of Trotsky’s assassination and Frida Kahlo makes a racy cameo—as she did in the real Bartoli’s life.
Josep marks the feature-length debut of Le Monde political cartoonist Aurel, who keeps the animation simple and the strokes broad. One especially vicious camp guard regularly morphs into a pig under Aurel’s brush, and Bartoli’s tortured artwork—collected and published upon his exile in Mexico—frequently comes to life.
It’s a little unprepossessing at first, but hang in there. The film's unfussy approach yields a kind of moral clarity, while a (presumably fictional) coda set in present day New York, Bartoli’s final home, delivers a rich emotional payload.
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