FILM
Wretched Lives Still Unredeemed
France’s “Les Misérables” 160 years after Victor Hugo
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Numerous fi lms, as well
as a successful Broadway
musical, have
adapted Victor Hugo’s
epic novel “Les Misérables.” The
story translates across borders
and time frames. It was fi rst fi lmed
in Italy in 1913. An Egyptian version
was made 30 years later. A
Japanese adaptation was produced
just last year. One might expect
a new French fi lm called “Les
Misérables,” directed by Lanj Ly, to
succeed Raymond Bernard (1934)
and Claude Lelouch (1995) as the
latest take on the novel from Hugo’s
own territory, but it actually
has no direct connection to it.
However, it tries to connect the
injustices of his time to ours by using
the same neighborhood, Montfermeil,
where Hugo’s character
Gavroche lives. Ly, who is Black,
grew up there and describes it as
“all but abandoned by the local
government agencies… probably
one of France’s worst ghettoes.”
“Les Misérables” conveys stasis
and repetition through its reference
points. French “banlieue
fi lms” took a look at the lives of
Arab and Black youth in the country’s
neglected and impoverished
suburbs in the ‘90s. Judging from
“Les Misérables,” nothing much
has improved since Mathieu Kassovitz
made “La Haine” (whose fi nal
scene it quotes) in 1995. In fact,
there was a riot in Montfermeil 10
years later.
The fi lm starts off with images
of Black children, but the narrative
begins with straitlaced cop
Stéphane (Damien Bonnard) getting
in a police car with two veterans
of the Les Bosquets housing
project patrol. Chris (Alexis Manenti)
and Gwada (Djebril Zonga)
are both quick to abuse their power
by harassing teenagers they suspect
of smoking hash or by barging
into a family’s apartment with no
search warrant. They spend most
of the day searching for a lion cub
stolen from a circus, which seems
like a theoretically harmless task.
The early scenes of “Les Misérables”
Djebril Zonga in Lanj Ly’s “Les Misérables.”
Actors playing the youth of Montfermeil, including Issa Perica and Al-Hassan Ly.
introduce us to the neighborhood’s
businesses, gangs, and
religious and political leaders. But
when a boy gets shot in the eye by
a cop and the whole scene is captured
by another boy’s drone, the
situation develops into something
tenser and more dangerous.
“Les Misérables” has an odd effect
of treating Black children and
its trio of cops as equal sparring
partners. But only the latter are
developed as individual people.
Chris and Gwada are jerks, but at
least they have personalities. Two
of the fi lm’s many boys stand out:
the kid with glasses who fl ies the
drone, and the kid who gets shot.
(The makeup artist did a great job;
the deep purple bruises under his
SRAB FILMS/ COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS
SRAB FILMS/ COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS
eyes are deeply haunting.) Elsewhere,
the children are depicted
as a collective. This effect is accentuated
toward the fi lm’s end,
when they all dress in black and
cover most of their faces. Ly doesn’t
present the cops, especially Chris
and Gwada, very sympathetically,
but his fi lm still encourages us to
identify with their perspective on
the neighborhood. (Stéphane is a
very familiar fi gure: the well-intentioned,
by-the-book cop shocked
by his more corrupt colleagues
and pressed into danger by them.)
Rather than showing what it’s like
to live there as a resident, the fi lm’s
narrative is structured around the
cops’ daily rounds.
Most of Ly’s direction is rather
plainspoken. The fi lm is shot in
broad daylight, with many exteriors.
But the periodic recourse to
drone shots gives us a bird’s-eyeview
of Montfermeil. These kinds
of images have become a cliché
in documentaries, but “Les Misérables”
uses them to comment
on the potential for depictions of
violence toward Black people committed
by police to spark change.
When the video of Rodney King’s
beating become ubiquitous, many
of us wondered how anyone could
watch it and acquit the cops who
did it. In this fi lm, when a teenage
girl is getting hassled by a cop, her
friend pulls out her phone, with a
promise of fi lming to follow. But
the many cell phone images of
police violence haven’t resulted in
real change and have often been
used by the media with zero sensitivity.
Implicitly, “Les Misérables”
wonders if its images of police brutality
and the rebellion that follows
it can accomplish any more.
Just as “La Haine” drew on Martin
Scorsese and Spike Lee, Ly
takes inspiration from Lee again
(especially “Do the Right Thing”)
and Antoine Fuqua’s “Training
Day.” He tries to avoid clichés associated
with this territory. For instance,
there’s little hip-hop in the
fi lm, apart from a scene where the
cops talk to an amateur rapper.
But “Les Misérables” plays like a
pilot for an “edgy” and “gritty” TV
cop show. The last half hour goes
further than such a show would,
and the fi lm closes with a confrontation
designed to bring home the
fi lm’s link to a grim reality. It’s too
bad that the results feel so compromised.
I’m sure Ly, who has spent
the past 20 years making documentaries,
has the best intentions,
but even the most urgent parts of
“Les Misérables” play more like a
badass genre vehicle than a cry
from the barricades.
LES MISÉRABLES | Directed by
Ladj Ly | In French with English
subtitles | Amazon Studios | Opens
Jan. 10 | Angelika Film Center, 18
Houston St. at Mercer St. | angelikafi
lmcenter.com/nyc
January 2 - January 15, 2 16 020 | GayCityNews.com
/nyc
/GayCityNews.com
