“Remember this my friends. There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”
This quote from Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables, ends Ladj Ly’s electrifying film LES MISERABLES, an epigram that amplifies that the epitaph has not yet been written for the injustice of racial discrimination.
LES MISERABLES begins with a mass show of solidarity regardless of race and class as France is victorious in a major sporting event. It ends with a claustrophobic climax of a society torn asunder, social fabric rent by the cultivation of suspicion and hate.
Set in Montfermeil, a neighbourhood in the Paris banlieue, LES MISERABLES has Stephane, a cop from the sticks commencing his new job riding with seasoned precinct patrollers, Chris and Gwada. The beat veterans dub the newby, Greaser, for his slick back hair style, a term of endearment laced with veiled derogatory.
Chris is white, the epitome of old school policing, a hot head bully sanctioned by the badge, Gwada, a black man, product of the projects, a buffer between his partners more brutal tactics, often falling back into silent acquiescence. The trio make up a good cop, bad cop, better cop ternion with tensions simmering from go to woe.
Tensions are ratcheted up a notch when one of the boys from the housing commission steals a lion cub from a travelling circus and the Romani ringmaster and his legion threaten death and destruction on the district if the purloined lion is not liberated.
What is initially an exotic escapade escalates into a seemingly unstoppable boiling over of ethnic and class ferment, the comical and farcical turning into incendiary tragedy.
At a time when films extol distraction to the detriment of focus, LES MISERABLES risks being eclipsed by the tenets of the blockbuster tent pole.
A block buster in its own right, LES MISERABLES is a film that both nourishes and entertains, a gripping policier that dramatically distils the living essence of societies and their problems, and despite geography, an extension and illumination of our experience, not something different and relaxingly apart.
