Damien Bonnard, Djebril Zonga, director Ladj Ly and Alexis Manenti at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival ... [+]
Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables has just been nominated for the Golden Globes 2020 in the category of Best Motion Picture: Foreign Language, alongside Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.
If you are expecting Les Misérables to be yet another adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, you would be greatly mistaken. Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables is not a musical nor a filmic adaptation of the French novel bearing the same title. There is no Jean Valjean or Cosette. Ladj Ly’s remarkable film follows three policemen in a Parisian suburb. The film won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival this year, and was just awarded the European Discovery: Prix Fipresci at the European Film Awards in Berlin this weekend. It was deemed by the revered French film journal, the Cahiers du cinéma, as the film France had been waiting for for the past 20 years.
The last French film about the Parisian suburbs that has had such an impact was Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995). Aside from being both set in a Parisian suburb, La Haine and Les Misérables are two very different films stylistically. Ly’s film has a documentary feel, in which the camera follows the action close to its protagonists. If you’ve been immersed in the police atmosphere of Canal Plus’ series Engrenages (Spiral is the English title), the style in Les Misérables isn’t too far off. This documentary style makes sense as Ladj Ly was first a documentary filmmaker, and his latest feature film is derived from one of his short documentaries.
Les Misérables opens with documentary images of football (soccer) fans in the streets of Paris celebrating the 2018 World Cup final. These are images of a nation united in victory that were plastered all over the news. Ladj Ly offers the other side of this image.
Les Misérables takes place in Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris, which was also where a section of Victor Hugo’s story was set. At the Montfermeil police station, we meet Stéphane Riuz (Damien Bonnard), who has just been transferred to this unit. On his first day at the job, his new colleagues, Chris (Alexis Manenti, who also co-wrote the script) and Gwada (Diebril Didier Zonga), give him a tour of the neighborhood. However, things quickly go wrong, starting with the report of a stolen baby lion. Searching for the boy, Issa (Issa Perica), who has taken the baby lion, the three policemen will find themselves implicated in a police misconduct case, which was recorded by a local boy’s drone.
The film uses this traditional narrative device, of following a newcomer, to allow the audience to discover this suburb as Stéphane does. He is not only introduced to a new neighborhood, but also to a new way of policing, which he does not seem accustomed to at the beginning of the film. This is the crucial point of this film. Les Misérables points the finger at police activities in these suburbs, showing that the problem lies heavily on the behaviors of police officers, who brutalize the inhabitants in their excessive use of authority. However, the film does not lay all the blame on police officers. This is where the reference to Victor Hugo’s novel is important. As the film quotes at the end: “There are no such thing as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”
The film builds an incredible tension that erupts in its final burst of violence in quite a similar way as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Much like Lee’s film, Les Misérables is anchored in the social and historical context of its location. Ladj Ly’s film is about the social and racial tensions that exist in France.
The story of Les Misérables has its base within director Ladj Ly’s own experience of witnessing police misconduct. Ly started his career as a filmmaker with videos of the police interacting with the young people of his neighborhood, Montfermeil itself, the same Parisian suburb where he grew up and still lives. He went on to direct short documentary films under the collective Kourtrajmé, witnessing the Paris riots of 2005. In 2008, he filmed police misconduct—just like the local boy with the drone in the film—and posted the footage online, that led to the suspension of the police officers. Ly made a short film about this, Les Misérables, which he then extended into his first feature film.
The film received immediate critical acclaim upon its release in France on November 20. French President Emmanuel Macron was reportedly touched by the film and has asked his government to find ways of improving living conditions in the suburbs. On French TV, Ladj Ly was happy to hear Macron had seen his film, as the director considers his film a wake-up call addressed to politicians who are largely responsible for the situation in the suburbs.
Amazon Studios acquired the U.S. rights to Les Miserables for reportedly $1.5 million after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It will have a limited release in the U.S. in January 2020, and is due on U.K. screens in April 2020.
