This powerful but flawed animation depicts the brilliant German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, creator of a remarkable series of quasi-autobiographical gouaches entitled Life? or Theatre?, painted in the period of her exile in Vichy France from 1941 to 1943, before she was taken to Auschwitz and there murdered at the age of 26; the paintings themselves are now held in Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum.
The movie is part of a vital tradition of representing the Holocaust through powerful animated images, stemming back to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Screenwriters Erik Rutherford and David Bezmozgis have worked from the narrative suggested by the artwork, but also from a confessional document that remained unpublished until 2015, in which Salomon revealed, among other things, that she murdered her grandfather. The directors are TV animators Tahir Rana (making his feature debut) and Éric Warin; Keira Knightley (and Marion Cotillard in the French language version) voices Salomon, who was a talented young artist in early 1930s Berlin. Her father Albert (Eddie Marsan) is a prosperous doctor and decorated first world war veteran, and stepmother Paula is a renowned classical singer; she is voiced by Helen McCrory, in her final film role.
