Los Miserables 2019 Site

A masterpiece of social thriller. Do not watch it expecting hope. Watch it because you need to understand why the hope ran out.

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This is not a redemption. It is a condemnation. Hugo believed in the possibility of mercy (Valjean sparing Javert). Ly shows that mercy is a luxury of the powerful. The film ends in an eternal loop: a brutalized child facing a scared cop. The gunshot could be Issa dying, or Stéphane dying, or both. It doesn’t matter. The system has already claimed its victims. Les Misérables was released just months before the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent global protests. But more presciently, it was set in Montfermeil, one of the epicenters of the 2005 French riots—the worst civil unrest France had seen since May 1968. Ly’s film is a warning that went unheeded. los miserables 2019

Where Hugo’s novel ends with Valjean dying in peace, forgiven by Cosette, Ly’s film offers no catharsis. It offers only the concrete, the drone, and the flame. In 2019, Ladj Ly took the most beloved title in French literature and turned it into an indictment. Les Misérables are still here. They are still angry. And they are still waiting for justice that never comes. A masterpiece of social thriller

The inciting incident is small. A runaway boy named Issa (Issa Perica) steals a lion cub from a traveling circus run by a Romani trainer, Zorro. When the circus owner threatens the entire neighborhood to get his animal back, the police hunt Issa down. The chase ends in a rooftop confrontation. Chris, in a moment of panicked brutality, fires a rubber bullet point-blank into Issa’s face. The boy collapses. The cops realize they have just maimed a child. By [Your Name] This is not a redemption

In 2019, a film simply titled Les Misérables arrived not as another adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, but as a devastating correction to it. Ladj Ly’s debut feature—nominated for an Oscar and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes—borrows the title of France’s great humanist epic to ask a harrowing question: What if Jean Valjean’s France never really changed?

When Buzz flies his drone, he sees everything the police try to hide. The drone democratizes surveillance. It takes the power of the panopticon—Foucault’s nightmare of the state watching you—and turns it back on the state. In the final, terrifying sequence, the drone is grounded. The only perspective left is Stéphane’s human eye, staring down a child with a bottle of fire. Without the witness, there is only violence. The ending of Les Misérables (2019) is notorious. After the police are trapped, Issa reappears. He has retrieved a Molotov cocktail. He walks slowly toward Stéphane, who has his gun drawn. Stéphane screams: “Ne tire pas!” (“Don’t shoot!”) but it is unclear if he is talking to Issa or to himself.