Les Mis­érables

When social depri­va­tion plum­mets to a lev­el where young lads think noth­ing of steal­ing a lion cub from a trav­el­ling cir­cus, then you know things have got­ten out of hand. Yet this is exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing in the Parisian ban­lieu of Mont­fer­meil, where schisms along all lines are turn­ing high-rise estates into hives of lawlessness.

And when peo­ple are unable to live peace­ably and har­mo­nious­ly, and feel that it’s A‑Okay to just steal a lion, the police then feel they’re empow­ered to employ slight­ly off-the-books oppres­sion in order to retain a sem­blance of order. Put sim­ply, they can rough peo­ple up on their rounds and there’s not a sweet thing that can be done about it.

Ladj Ly’s debut fea­ture, Les Misérables, is ripped from per­son­al expe­ri­ence and set on the infa­mous hous­ing estate ​“les Bosquets”. It fol­lows the pro­fes­sion­al bap­tism of fire expe­ri­enced by hair gel addict rook­ie cop Stéphane (Damien Bon­nard) who, on his first day, escapes the clutch­es of death a num­ber of times. He cruis­es along with Dje­bril Zonga’s chill urban war­rior, Gwa­da, and Alex­is Manenti’s gale-force rageo­holic, Chris, as the team spend their day harass­ing ran­dos and throw­ing their weight about like ginned-up rustlers.

The inci­dent with the lion cub occurs, a hub­bub ensues, the trig­ger on a flash ball gun goes off and, in the resid­ual heat of France’s 2018 World Cup vic­to­ry, a full-scale melt­down seems inevitable. Plus, reg­u­lar hush-up tac­tics don’t apply in this case, as a both­er­some drone-cam being flown by one of the young res­i­dents, catch­es the whole inci­dent from on high.

The film comes across as a less stylised, less self-con­scious­ly poet­ic (but no less effec­tive) update of Math­ieu Kasso­vitz’ pow­der-keg 1995 fea­ture, La Haine, which intro­duced the world to the hor­rors of dai­ly life out­side the snow globe of cen­tral Paris.

It’s the type of film you’d expect con­cerned politi­cos to watch and then solemn­ly announce that they now under­stand the work that needs to be done in areas rife with pover­ty, while also acknowl­edg­ing the insti­tu­tion­al rot with­in the police force – and then take no fur­ther action. In his direc­tion and writ­ing (the lat­ter com­plet­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gior­dano Ged­er­li­ni and Alex­is Manen­ti), Ly appor­tions blame fair­ly, and to be hon­est, there’s no one here to root for save the hap­less Stéphane, and even he turns the odd blind eye to Chris’ berserko outbursts.

Aside from its admirable sense of moral objec­tiv­i­ty, the film also purrs along nice­ly as a slick thriller that arrives at a sat­is­fy­ing­ly bom­bas­tic cli­max in which fire­works are repur­posed as ad hoc bazookas in order to send those dirty pigs a skin-sear­ing les­son they’ll nev­er for­get. If the film has an issue, it’s that the plot­ting is too fas­tid­i­ous, and every­thing fits togeth­er a lit­tle too neatly.

The chaot­ic aspect of the sit­u­a­tion is cap­tured in the many bouts of group shout­ing, but then most of the sup­port­ing cast oper­ate like they would in a genre film rather than real life. Plus, the moment where the drone just hap­pens to hov­er over the piv­otal alter­ca­tion does feel a tad far-fetched, even with the reams of por­ten­tous build-up that is front-loaded into the plot.