Les Misérables is a modern french film, the first full length feature of Ladj Ly. Its only real connection with Victor Hugo's homonymous masterpiece is the area that it takes place in as well as the general feeling of life and its tragedies being a vicious unending circle.
Ladj Ly's Les Misérables is a cynical, raw and quite violent glance at everyday life in France and in particular in neighbourhoods where ghettos rule and policemen only try to somewhat control the situation - not very successfully, might I add. Les Misérables has the amazing gift of presenting all standpoints without actually taking the side of anyone: at times you may root for the kind policeman/family man who tries to do his best and prove himself to his colleagues; at times you take the side of the small poor child who has only lived in a poor neighbourhood surrounded by racism, prejudice, violence and bullying and tries to grow up and become a normal unproblematic adult. There are times where you tend to root for the people who struggle to govern these areas by diplomatically making everyone moderately happy without simultaneously letting the situation unfold and end up in a violent bang. At the same time Ladj Ly achieves to make his audience dislike the policeman who abuses his power and resorts to brutality in order to feel more powerful himself; he also makes us understand that these conditions damage the kids who experience them and actually brainwash them into perpetuating the ordeal.
Through prejudice, more prejudice is created and through violence, more violent people are born. The director manages to show that effortlessly and flawlessly by giving us a rather different idea than what we might have in mind about France. Ly also presents the situation as it actually is now all over Europe: the right wing is on the rise, racism separates people who are mindlessly divided into racial, ethnic or even religious groups and are all manipulated by those faceless and nameless who know how to take advantage of the troubling climate.
Les misérables is a pessimistic movie - quite true to the dramatic flair of European Cinema. It does not take a stand; it just presents things as they are and it does not really try to answer the question of what is wrong and what is right. It just lets its audience decide and be touched by what is going on on screen. The film simply ends with a rather wise quote by Victor Hugo: "Remember this my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators."
The film won the Audience Award at the Athens International Film Festival.
The film won the Audience Award at the Athens International Film Festival.
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