Les Misérables review: blood, rage and barricades on the streets of Paris
Dir: Ladj Ly. Cast: Alexis Manenti, Djibril Zonga, Damien Bonnard, Issa Perica, Al-Hassan Ly, Steve Tientcheu, Almamy Kanouté. 15 cert, 104 mins
Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind. Beaten down and bedraggled, it belongs to the orphan Cosette, as drawn by Émile Bayard for the first edition of Victor Hugo’s novel, and then emblematised in 1985 by what would become the world’s longest-running musical.
The new film from Ladj Ly, which shares its title with Hugo’s novel, ends on a very different young face. It, too, is framed by slums and shows signs of serious maltreatment – but, though bloodied and bruised, it’s utterly defiant and ready for a fight.
It belongs to Issa (Issa Perica), a lad from the Les Bosquets housing estate in the suburb of Montfermeil, east of Paris, where sections of Hugo’s novel played out 150 years ago. (It’s also where the 42-year-old Mali-born Ly was raised, and has been shooting documentaries for the last 15 years.)
When the film opens on the morning of the 2018 World Cup final, Issa’s face is also the first we see, as he scampers from his tower block with the Tricolore wrapped around his shoulders and painted on his cheek. He and his older friends jump the Metro ticket barriers and make for the Champs-Élysées, where they’re instantly absorbed by the flag-waving, La Marseillaise-singing, and very conspicuously multiracial crowd.
The plainclothes cops of the Street Crimes Unit who oversee Issa’s estate are just as diverse – though these PCs aren’t a particularly PC bunch. On his first day on the beat, the heavily Brylcreemed Stéphane (Damien Bonnard) is immediately nicknamed “Greaser” by his white colleague Chris (Alexis Manenti), while their black patrol-mate Gwada (Djebril Zonga) approvingly chuckles in the driver’s seat.
Rather than outsiders, law enforcement just feels like another branch of the estate’s intricate underworld ecosystem, where drug dealers, Muslim fundamentalists and Nigerian pimps all rub along in uneasy proximity. The place is a melting pot that’s clearly on the verge of boiling over, and Chris seems to revel in the tension. He banters with the locals – a man he put away for four years is playfully referred to as “a former client” – yet the ribbing’s often laced with pure aggression, and a rough stop-and-search of three teenage girls has a nasty sexual charge.
While investigating the theft of a lion cub from a travelling circus (of all things), Issa and his friends are confronted and chased by the SCU – and in the panic, something awful happens which could spark civil unrest on the scale of an all-consuming blaze. Worse still, the incident is caught on camera by a drone, which Chris and his partners now set about retrieving with some urgency.
It was in nearby Clichy-sous-Bois that the 2005 Paris riots caught light, and Ly’s characters – or the adults, at least – live in dread of another flare-up. With the mercury grazing 35 degrees, the police commissioner (Jeanne Balibar) assumes the day’s too hot for trouble – yet as in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, the temperature is anything but soothing.
Only after a conciliatory lull which we hope might germinate into a happy ending does Ly cleverly unleash his climactic to-the-barricades moment, and it’s horrifying rather than stirring: a bloody stairwell last stand that feels like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 by way of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine. Ly shoots his action and dialogue sequences intimately and fluidly, but you can feel his documentarian’s eye always scanning the bigger picture for telling details of everyday life in this tinderbox town where his directorial instincts were honed, and through which his camera still darts and prowls.
Fleet of foot and fiery of belly, this new Les Mis is an attention-commanding debut from a filmmaker with a finger on his home town’s ever-quickening pulse.
Les Misérables is in cinemas now
