Les Indésir­ables – first-look review

With his first fic­tion fea­ture, 2019’s police-bru­tal­i­ty dra­ma Les Mis­érables, Ladj Ly won the Jury Prize at Cannes and the César for Best Film, and more or less instan­ta­neous­ly became French cin­e­ma culture’s go-to explain­er of How the Oth­er Half Lives. The case for his films is that he observes dai­ly life, tran­scribes griev­ances and faith­ful­ly reports on the moments of fric­tion at the edge of the French estab­lish­ment, where its gate­keep­ers clash with those clam­our­ing – in unfa­mil­iar accents – to be let in. 

If the dra­matur­gy of Les Mis­érables was didac­tic, and its erup­tive cli­max hyper­bol­ic, it nev­er­the­less had a cacoph­o­nous urgency, like an over­heard con­fronta­tion at the oth­er end of the sub­way plat­form. The com­pressed, ruth­less­ly log­i­cal plot­ting, which is set in motion by a sin­gle police patrol in one of the ban­lieues of sub­ur­ban Paris, exerts a cen­trifu­gal pull on char­ac­ters who, as the man said, all have their rea­sons, unfurl­ing a vio­lent, panoram­ic social portrait.

Les Indésir­ables (named Bâti­ment 5, ​“Build­ing 5,” in French, but giv­en a sequelis­ing title in Eng­lish), estab­lish­es Ly’s project as inves­ti­gat­ing the con­di­tions of France’s urban mar­gins through a sequen­tial focus on dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions. Les Mis­érables, like Sea­son One of The Wire, was about the police; Les Indésir­ables is about pub­lic hous­ing itself.

The film large­ly con­cerns a sin­gle tow­er block, intro­duced in an open­ing sequence in which the African-dias­po­ra com­mu­ni­ty endures the unwieldy, undig­ni­fied thump­ing pro­ces­sion of a matriarch’s cas­ket down sev­er­al steep flights of the building’s under­lit con­crete stair­well – the ele­va­tor hasn’t worked in years, one of the mourn­ers moans. Ly and his cowriter Gior­dano Ged­er­li­ni chart the nar­ra­tive ter­rain through the inex­pe­ri­enced new Act­ing May­or Pierre (Alex­is Maneti), a pae­di­a­tri­cian who sets out to improve the area’s qual­i­ty of life through demo­li­tion and ren­o­va­tion of the neighbourhood. 

There’s also Haby (Anty Diaw) a social work­er who helps her neigh­bours nav­i­gate the local bureau­cra­cy and advo­cates for fair com­pen­sa­tion for relo­cat­ed ten­ants and suf­fi­cient space in the new builds. Pierre and Haby’s dai­ly work brings them into con­tact with a vari­ety of sim­mer­ing con­flicts: the reset­tle­ment of Syr­i­an refugees (and the resent­ment of under­served exist­ing com­mu­ni­ties who detect pref­er­en­tial treat­ment); per­mit­ting issues around an ille­gal pri­vate-kitchen restau­rant; pet­ty crime and police overreaction.

This is a promis­ing set­up, but the exe­cu­tion is remark­ably dif­fuse and sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic. Ly and Ged­er­li­ni intro­duce plot ele­ments that don’t pay off lat­er. For one, Pierre’s pre­de­ces­sor was appar­ent­ly under inves­ti­ga­tion for cor­rup­tion and it might put a spin on his pathol­o­gis­ing pro­gram of slum clear­ance if, for instance, we had a sense that the infra­struc­ture project was com­pro­mised by crony­ism and kick­backs among fix­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty, but maybe all that was in an ear­li­er draft. There are also wild, unfo­cused swings in the plot­ting, as Pierre ran­dom­ly insti­tutes an extreme cur­few, inspir­ing protests and police reprisals, in a dimin­ish­ing-returns echo of Les Mis. 

Rather than a foren­sic film, chan­nel­ing its char­ac­ters through a process-ori­ent­ed nar­ra­tive that nat­u­ral­ly reveals dif­fer­ent facets of their psy­ches, or uncov­ers dif­fer­ent aspects of their moti­va­tions and locates them with­in a wider con­text, Les Indésir­ables is mere­ly a shouty film, in which char­ac­ters explain their beliefs to each oth­er so we’ll remem­ber to apply them dur­ing the next shock­ing act of violence.

Ly directs with edgy flu­en­cy, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the film’s show­piece sequence, the forced evac­u­a­tion of a pos­si­bly unsafe pub­lic-hous­ing tow­er, in which even the most manip­u­la­tive heart­string yanks – like a child run­ning back in for a plushy toy – are inter­wo­ven into a chore­o­graphed con­fu­sion of exile, with res­i­dents pack­ing in pan­ic, triag­ing their world­ly belong­ings as the riot squad rush them out of their homes. But a real­ist approach to agit­prop — nat­ur­al light, hand­held cam­era, tex­tures extend­ing out­side the frame — only works if the writ­ing is as accu­rate as the emotion. 

Even account­ing for the high-hand­ed­ness of French sec­u­lar lib­er­al author­i­ty (cf the ever-expand­ing bur­ka ban), it’s just spot­ty writ­ing to make Pierre be so bad at retail pol­i­tics — a coun­cilmem­ber for three years at the start of the film, he seems to have nev­er inter­act­ed with an emo­tion­al con­stituent before — and real-life dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ists do not state their inten­tions as blunt­ly and unsym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly as Pierre explains his ratio­nale for the evac­u­a­tion, not even in private. 

By the movie’s end, many of Ly’s char­ac­ters find them­selves with nowhere to go and noth­ing to do except burn it all down. The same can be said of the film­mak­er, who attempts to reprise Les Misérables’s bour­geois-bait­ing final act of ret­ribu­tive vio­lence, this time inter­spersed with a ram­pag­ing character’s run­ning com­men­tary on the mean­ing of his own actions, lest Ly’s art­house crowd find his depic­tion of under­class rage too unset­tling and unresolved.