Country: France
Director: Ladj Ly
Time: 1 hour and 43 minutes
What It Evokes: Order and chaos, societal stratification, systems of discipline
Where Can I Get It: Amazon (free w/subscription)
A number of prior write-ups have discussed the endings of films. This is a somewhat banal point: films have endings and good films have good endings. Indeed, most films interested in character and some central dilemma (around which our understanding of a character unfurls) will, to quote a better writer than myself, “push the moment to its crisis.” Les Misérables too possesses an incredible final sequence though, in its version of the cinematic universe, the world decidedly ends with a bang. Ladj Ly’s film examines festering social tensions and fissures aggravated by competing centers of authority (some state-based, others more informal) vying for power on the periphery of Paris. The induction of a police officer (recently transferred) into the local police force offers a vehicle through which viewers glimpse suburban policing tactics and strategies forced to negotiate with various layers of communal authority—in contradistinction to the United States, Parisian banlieus (or suburbs) tend to be poorer than the “inner city” and the film takes place in the eastern suburb of Montfermil, a space memorialized within Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, from which the movie draws its name. In the film, an accidental (and careless) act of extreme violence against Issa, a child and central character, by one of the cops sets a whirlwind plot in motion with dire consequences for all concerned. If Ladj Ly’s film grasps something, it remains the continual negotiation between different societal stakeholders (a “Mayor” and his supporters, a group of devout Muslims, itinerant circus performers—scarier than they sound—and the police) each competing to organize and manage Montfermil in ways beneficial to themselves.
Indebted to Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), a film similarly set in the banlieus and one of the most powerful pieces of French film making in the past 30 years, Les Misérables confronts questions of race, religion, assimilation, policing and state authority in relationship to a group of teenagers who function, in many ways, as a stand-in for a new, multiethnic, and multicultural but dispossessed France. At its base, Les Misérables remains a film with a warning about the chaos that lurks underneath (various) systems of control and the ways those systems exacerbate the very fissures they’re meant to contain. Yet, as this review began so it must end with the film’s final scenes, for their sheer tenseness, bravado, and horror underscore how revolution emerges from state systems incapable of marshaling resources effectively or offering opportunities to the dispossessed. This is a hard film to watch, but also an important film to see.
Mathieu Kassovitz —La Haine (1995)
Laurent Cantet — The Class (2008)