Les Misérables

I walked into the theater to see Les Miserables late this afternoon with no expectations.

Maybe a thought that this was a modern 'woke' version of Hugo's classic. It isn't. It's a gritty, fast paced, police procedural set in the banlieues of Paris. Unflinching about what the police find there, and how the police act and react to a Paris that tourists never see.

Sobering and revolutionary.

A stunning find and a great movie.

In Paris the fragile peace between gangs and police is threatened when a lion cub from the circus goes astray. Depicting the harsh and violent culture of the authorities and those the authorities universally neglect and forget (the world over): you reap what you sow and cultivate, if it has sharp fangs it will bite you where it hurts the most.

Les Miserables - 2020 French crime drama on Netflix. I've not seen the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel but I reckon you couldn't get two films further apart. 3 policemen - two of whom have been brought up in the tough Parisian neighbourhoods in which they patrol. The other, a rookie fresh from leafy Cherbourg definitely has not. Rookie does not like the rough tactics of his two colleagues. And neither do we. But he - and we - soon come to learn that it isn't as clear cut as we think. The softly softly approach may not stand the test of time. This is a bleak film about a bleak world. And it's absolutely right that there's no easy answers. There is no sugar coating. And maybe rookie is just naive. And maybe we are too. My kind of film. A thought provoking 8 out of ten.

The movie is very good but left me a bit unsatisfied. It is well shot with good acting from all the actors. But it seems like the story was mixed with La Haine, Banlieue 13 Ultimatum and City of God. The bad cop/good cop story line along with the outsider point of view of one of the policemen felt cliché (as some parts of the dialogue). It has a good message and I could clearly see the intentions of the director in making this movie. But, as someone familiar with French cinema that shows Paris suburbs, police brutality and racism in France in general, I haven't seen anything new here. And I know there's still a lot in those issues that hasn't been shown in movies yet. As this movie is nominated for an oscar I was expecting something more.

"Those who live are those who fight." Victor Hugo

Because I have had my fill of violence recently in the realism of For Sama and the fantasy of The Gentlemen, I can more easily recognize the artistic importance of it to represent the malign tendencies of human nature and the absurdity of having to defend life with terror rather than thought. The rugged streets of ethnically-diverse Paris, usually hidden from us white travelers, come alive in this loose update of Les miserables by director Ladj Li's

Violence is cinematic, and in the Oscar-nominated Les miserables, set in Hugo's modern-Paris hood, it serves to explode in our minds the great divide between kids and adults and the evil of police brutality for those kids doomed to spend their days under racist dominance and ignorant supervision. The

Young Issa (Issa Perica) steals a baby lion from a circus; an active crime unit, led by modern-Javert Chris (writer Alexis Mananti), pursues him with brutal results. As white police clash with predominantly Muslim citizens, kids ironically become the antagonists, as if writer/director Li wanted to remind us that in Lord-of-the-Flies tradition, even the innocent are not so innocent if we teach them well. Hugo would have agreed that the adults in charge are jailers with cruelty on their minds.

The cinematographic movement of this Oscar-nominated drama is active with Steadicam balance and drone perspective. We are there.

Of the dozen or so characters, not one is neglected, and not one is irrelevant to the plot. As for the Parisian setting, Ladj makes sure the Eifel Tower appears in a few shots, more I suspect to make fun of our cliched experience with the great city because the hood we see in Les miserables is the world we most likely would never see in our travels. Chalk up another of cinema's gifts to us.

Here's a film of enormous humanity and entertainment couched in a tense world of racist clashes and violent conclusions. Hugo would agree while offering a modicum of hope: "The darkest night will end, and the sun will rise."