Les Misérables (Ladj Ly, 2019)
Added 2021-01-12 22:04:58 +0000 UTC
I don't have a great deal to say about this one. I mostly watched it to bring my 2019 Cannes bingo card one spot closer to blackout. (Will we ever see Kechiche's Intermezzo? I'm thinking no.) At first I bailed on this at the halfway mark, since its plotting and characterization felt predictable and overdetermined. (Ladj Ly will eventually work in Hollywood, mark my words.) But I checked out some reviews and they all said it kicked into high gear just seconds after my check-out point, so I felt I had to go back.
Les Misérables is fine. It seems to be stuck between a desire to show the banlieue cops as violent, aggressive assholes, and a liberal assumption that Cops are People Too, and some of them are basically good. In fact, Ly gives us an obviously bad cop (Alexis Manenti), a rookie, by-the-book good cop (Damien Bonnard), and a third cop (Djebril Zonga) who grew up in the projects and is torn between these two conflicting impulses.
A lot seems to center on a police fuckup captured by a camera drone by local kid Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly, the director's son). But it's not especially clear that the footage led to the uprising we see at the end. That's because the brutality victim, Issa (Issa Perica) is alive and conscious, and has gotten the neighborhood to join his crusade for revenge. The final shot is a strange iris of Issa at a moment of decision, which is obviously one of those "the rest is up to you" kind of non-endings, but somehow it doesn't feel earned.
