Old Yorker

  • Les misérables

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ladj Ly (2019)

    There’s nothing like a major sporting triumph to bring a country together.  You can be highly dissatisfied with the state of the nation but still enjoy being on the winning side – for a few hours anyway.  Ladj Ly’s Les misérables begins on 15 July 2018, the day that France won the soccer World Cup for the second time.   In the opening sequences, a young adolescent boy called Issa (Issa Perica) is happily draped in the French tricolor and among thousands of Parisians celebrating on the Champs-Élysées.  The crowd is ethnically diverse, like the French team that beat Croatia 4-2.  Their three scorers (the first goal was a Croatian own goal) were Antoine Griezmann (of German and Portuguese descent), Paul Pogba (Guinean parents) and – as predicted by Issa to a friend – Kylian Mbappé.  The son of an Algerian mother and a Cameroonian father, Mbappé was brought up in the Paris suburb of Bondy, not far from Issa’s home in the commune of Montfermeil.  On the day of the final, Issa has one of his cheeks painted red, white and blue.  He looks very different twenty-four hours later, after being shot in the face by a police flash-ball.  At the climax to the film, the day after that, he and other residents in Montfermeil’s Les Bosquets projects, take revenge on the police patrol concerned.  In the closing shots of Les misérables one of the patrol team is pointing a gun at Issa, begging the boy not to throw the Molotov cocktail he holds in his hand.

    Like Issa, Ladj Ly, whose parents are from Mali, grew up in Montfermeil – also the location of the Thénardiers’ inn in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables from which this new film, Ly’s first feature, takes its title.  The question of whether the climactic showdown here is based on actual events is virtually superfluous:  we know violence of this kind was taking place in Parisian ghettoes as long ago as the ‘émeutes de 2005 dans les banlieues françaises’, a three-week period of riots in the suburbs of Paris (and other French cities).  These involved young people of predominantly African, North African and Arab heritage in the burning of cars and public buildings, and other acts of violence.  But the mayhem in the film definitely isn’t a dramatisation of events a couple of days after France’s World Cup win – which Ly uses to achieve a heightened contrast between national euphoria and continuing reality.  In fact, Les misérables is an expansion of the director’s 2017 short of the same name, which derived from a real incident in Montfermeil in 2008.

    On the day after the final, Stéphane Ruiz (Damien Bonnard) starts a new posting with the Paris ‘Street Crimes Unit’ (SCU).  He’s part of a team of three officers that also includes Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djebril Zonga).  It’s soon evident that Chris, the hard-nosed team leader, is ready to lay down the law aggressively and that the unassertive Gwada won’t argue.  The catalysing event in the plot is the theft of a lion cub from a local circus, run by Zorro (Raymond Lopez).  The thief’s identity is soon revealed when one of his friends posts an Instagram picture of Issa, who is a known juvenile delinquent, with the cub.  When the three police officers track him down, other friends of Issa try to prevent his arrest by throwing stones and other missiles.  In the ensuing confusion, Gwada first accidentally releases tear gas into his own face, then shoots a flash-ball at Issa, stunning and wounding him.  Stéphane wants to get the boy to a hospital.  Chris and (therefore) Gwada have a different priority.  They realise almost immediately that the scuffle, including the flash-ball shot, has been filmed by a drone.  Leaving Stéphane in the squad car to mind the injured Issa, they head off into a nearby apartment block in search of the drone’s owner.

    The tinderbox set-up brings to mind Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but Les misérables isn’t a slow burn to a single explosion.  The violence is salient from an early stage and not only in the encounter that ends with Gwada’s flash-ball.  It informs Chris’s abusive language and hostile attitude.  (The shirt he wears is emblazoned, expressively, with the word Venum, the name of a combat-sportswear line.)  And violence is more upsettingly present in a sequence of physical and emotional abuse that just stops short of actual bodily harm.  The police, with Issa in tow, return the lion cub to Zorro.  The latter comments cursorily on the state of the boy’s face before putting the cub back in his cage, grabbing Issa before the police can stop him, and standing with him inside the cage of the circus’s adult lion.  The snarling animal and the terrified, weeping boy are both on the receiving end of Zorro’s cruelty.  (It’s conceivable that Ly means to liken the caged lion and lion cub, as African imports, to Paris’s citizens of African heritage.)

    Les misérables is a propulsive piece of film-making.  It quickly acquires an in-your-face momentum that Ladj Ly never loses, thanks to the storyline, the rapidly successive action sequences, a pulsing score (by the Pink Noise duo of Marco Casanova and Kim Chapiron) and Flora Volpelière’s brilliant editing.  It should be said the cutting is just as, though differently, impressive in the rare relatively quiet scenes – especially the police officers’ return to their homes at the end of their manic Monday, and the meeting that evening of Stéphane and Gwada in a bar.  A short domestic scene between the latter and his mother (Mousba Harb) – he in SCU uniform, she in African costume – is particularly eloquent.

    Ly and his cinematographer Julien Poupard create some powerful images and effects.  A high-altitude shot isn’t, as it sometimes seems to be in a film, a God’s-eye view of events – and God’s eye because the director is displaying their omnipotence.  In Les misérables, the view from above is that of the drone owner, Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly), another teenage boy, from the top of the tower block which is the recurring focus of the SCU investigations and the site of the final confrontation.  The prelude to that confrontation is a deceptively light-hearted attack on the squad car by kids from the block with water pistols.  The World Cup’s feelgood effect rapidly vanishes but reminders of it don’t quite disappear, thanks to the blue French football shirt worn throughout by a Mr Big of Montfermeil – the self-styled Mayor of the locality (‘Le Maire’ is printed on the back of the shirt).  The successive transformations of Issa’s face are remarkable.  It’s zombie-like in the aftermath of his injury and the episode in the lion’s cage.  In the finale, Issa’s face is once again ardently animated – an animation very different from the delight he radiated after the football match.

    The film’s exceptional dynamism obscures a simplistic screenplay (by Ly, Alexis Manenti and Giordano Gederlini).  The police officers, well though all three are played, are schematically defined:  Stéphane and Chris are decidedly good cop/bad cop.  The latter is presented as more or less psychopathic, except in a snatch of his harassed home life that briefly normalises him.  While he and Gwada are hunting Buzz, Stéphane disobeys orders by driving off in the squad car to get medication for Issa from a pharmacy.  In the event, it’s Stéphane who gets hold of the drone’s memory card and who, when they meet in the bar, hands it over to Gwada – along with the responsibility to decide whether to own up to injuring Issa.  Gwada is trapped in a racial dilemma too – a black man working for an organisation perceived as inimical to the non-white denizens of Les Bosquets.  (It’s essential to Ly’s scheme that Gwada is the one who wounds Issa.)  Morality play-like distinctions between the principals are mirrored in supporting characters:  on the one hand, the unscrupulous Mayor (Steve Tientcheu), who is less concerned with representing his community than with consolidating his own power within it; on the other, the devout Muslim Salah (Almamy Kanouté), an ex-convict who now runs a Montfermeil kebab house.

    The pandemonium of the climax leads to the final face-off between Issa and Stéphane in the tower block stairwell.  The camera’s movement to and fro between them is extended (perhaps over-extended).  It’s a mutual and symbolic point-of-no-return that Ly leaves unresolved, as if asking the French political and civic authorities, ‘So how do you want this to turn out?’  The screen fades to black and a quote from Hugo’s Les misérables – ‘There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators’.  The film draws its power from a kinetic style and from the viewer’s awareness that it’s a warning about an urgent, real-life socio-cultural crisis.  It’s no surprise to read (on Wikipedia) that President Macron, on seeing Ly’s film, ‘asked the government to find ideas and act to improve living conditions in the banlieues’, a view echoed by prominent politicians of other parties.  In achieving this level of public reaction, Ladj Ly has achieved what he surely set out to achieve (not to mention the various awards his film has won).  But Les misérables is short on insight and characterisation.  Despite its unarguable impact, it’s a shallow piece of dramatic cinema.

    7 September 2020

  • What a Crazy World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Carreras (1963)

    According to a DVD review on the Amazon website, What a Crazy World happened because Joan Littlewood’s partner Gerry Raffles happened to see Joe Brown on television, performing what became the film’s title number.  Raffles liked what he heard and commissioned Alan Klein, who wrote the song, to develop a full-scale musical for Theatre Workshop.  The result was performed at Stratford East before morphing into Michael Carreras’s film, whose cast is a mixture of current pop names (Brown, Marty Wilde, Susan Maughan) and Theatre Workshop alumni (Harry H Corbett, Avis Bunnage, Fanny Carby et al).  Joe Brown plays What a Crazy World’s young East Ender hero, Alf Hitchens, who wants to get into the music business.  He hawks round Denmark Street in vain a song he’s written but does manage to get a dogsbody office job in London’s answer to Tin Pan Alley.  His music publisher boss there laughingly refers to Alf as ‘our budding Lionel Bart’.

    The early 1960s, thanks to Oliver! and Blitz!, were Bart’s West End heyday but the first show whose song score he wrote single-handed was Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be, which also began life at Theatre Workshop, in 1959.  That musical comedy and What a Crazy World have fings in common.  Bart’s piece (with book by Frank Norman), set in the 1950s, is peopled by Cockney spivs, Teds, tarts and dodgy policemen.  Klein’s principals are younger; Alf’s girlfriend Marilyn (Susan Maughan) and his sister Doris (Grazina Frame) have respectable jobs; but the boys, at the start, are out of work and may be on a slippery slope.  Alf’s best mate Herbie (Marty Wilde) looks set to emulate his many relatives who’ve done time – he sings about them in ‘Oh What a Family’.  With three other lads (Alan Klein, along with Barry Bethel and David Nott), Herbie also performs What a Crazy World‘s opener, ‘A Layabout’s Lament’, in the local labour exchange.  This echoes the jaunty, tongue-in-cheek, times-changing-for-the-worse thrust of Lionel Bart’s title song for Fings.

    Sad to say, it also makes for a shocking start to the film.  Carreras peoples the labour exchange with Africans, Arabs, Chinese and Indians, all in supposedly comical national dress – you can’t move in the place for turbans and burnouses.  ‘A Layabout’s Lament’ reads as a gruesome variation on the traditional anti-immigrant lament:  instead of ‘they come over here and take our jobs’, ‘they come over here and take our place in the dole queue’.  Except for a few teenagers of colour on the margins of a later sequence in a British Legion dance hall, the labour exchange men are the only non-whites seen throughout – never mind that the opening titles sequence is a crowded street scene, in a Petticoat Lane-type market.

    Present-day viewers will likely struggle to forgive or forget that first number – a pity because What a Crazy World is not only entertaining but an interesting piece of social history too, in more engaging ways.  As well as scenes shot on location in Denmark Street and by Cleopatra’s Needle, Carreras (who co-wrote the screenplay with Klein) shows the youngsters in, for example, an amusement arcade, a coffee bar, a cinema and a bowling alley – the last perhaps a nod to the lyrics of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (‘They changed our local Palais into a bowling alley’).  What’s more, Alf’s determination to get into professional songwriting must have played strongly to audiences of his generation as an especially appealing (and, by 1963, possible) escape route from dead-end jobs or no jobs at all.

    What a Crazy World may be indebted too, more unexpectedly so, to another contemporary stage success.  As in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons (first produced in the West End in 1960), Klein’s musical has a Common Man figure (Michael Ripper).  He keeps popping up in different guises – a street vendor, a labour exchange jobsworth, the amusement arcade manager, the coffee bar owner.  Later on, he’s a spoilsport park-keeper and (out of character) an oldish bloke sitting behind Alf and Marilyn at the pictures, where he sentimentally earwigs on their romantic conversation.  The Common Man (he’s so named in the credits) is usually harassed – his mantra is ‘Bleedin’ kids’.  The film, in contrast, is, almost needless to say, firmly on the side of the younger generation (Alan Klein was only in his early twenties).  Alf’s parents, Sam (Harry H Corbett) and Mary (Avis Bunnage), spend their evenings as per the title song – ‘Dad’s gone down the dog track, mother’s playin’ bingo’.  That’s the first line of the chorus.  The third line – ‘No one seems to notice me, isn’t it a sin?’ – is, if anything, even more essential to the piece.  Alf’s tone isn’t at all self-pitying.  Even so, he wants to be noticed.

    ‘What a Crazy World (We’re Livin In)’ wasn’t a big hit when Joe Brown released it in 1962 (unlike his next single, ‘A Picture of You’) but this is the song Alf is trying to sell, and the film too depends on it.  A brass band is playing the tune in the opening market scene.  We see and hear Alf composing the number, strumming away on a banjo.  It accompanies the closing credits, with different characters each singing a line.  Oddly, though, what supposedly caught Gerry Raffles’s attention in the first place is never heard in its entirety, for all its superiority to the other songs.  Klein dutifully put together the required musical elements – an I-want-to-be-someone solo (‘Please Give Me a Chance’), a lovers’ tiff duet (‘I Feel the Same Way Too’), and so on.  Alf, Doris and their younger brother Joey (Michael Goodman) do ‘Bruvvers’, a lively, cheerful complaint about each other.  The Hitchens parents envy their kids’ relatively easy life in ‘Things We Never Had’.  All these are agreeable enough but the tunes are basic and the words no more than serviceable.  It’s the combination of social context and engaging performances that brings What a Crazy World to life.

    Except for Freddie and the Dreamers, who appear as themselves (or nearly themselves:  they’re billed as ‘Frantic’ Freddie and the Dreamers) at the British Legion dance hall, the pop stars in the cast need to act as well as sing.  Joe Brown, thoroughly natural and greatly likeable, is by far the most successful – he holds the film together with ease.  Marty Wilde does well too; compared with Brown, he’s delivering more of a turn but very ably.  Susan (‘Bobby’s Girl’) Maughan is wooden but her speaking voice is such an extraordinary concoction you’re almost glad it’s been recorded for posterity.  Maughan’s own vowel sounds (Birmingham via County Durham) keep intruding on her awkward attempt at a London accent.  More occasionally, she sounds mid-Atlantic or an English cut above her working-class East End character.  Perhaps Maughan is making the point that Marilyn (it’s she who sings ‘Please Give Me a Chance’) has aspirations.  Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking.  For their part, the experienced actors have to sing a bit – or speak sing.  Avis Bunnage does that very effectively in ‘Things We Never Had’, which cuts between Mary at bingo and Sam in the bar at the dog track.  Harry H Corbett has dynamism to spare throughout – he verges on the overpowering.  I liked Michael Goodman as Joey (according to IMDb, he hardly ever acted on screen again), the ever-reliable Fanny Carby as Mary’s friend and bingo companion, and Larry Dann, another Theatre Workshop regular, as one of Alf’s friends.

    As a piece of film-making, What a Crazy World is sometimes remarkably primitive.  The Denmark Street episode focuses so heavily on Alf getting chucked out of every place he tries that it’s a surprise when he turns out to have got the job with Solly Gold (Monte Landis).  The camera soars miles above Alf and Marilyn during one of their duets; image and sound are on the point of fadeout when Michael Carreras suddenly cuts to a near-close-up of the couple and the volume goes back up.  Near the end, a montage of newspaper headlines (‘Unknown writes number one hit’) seems to be revealed as a fantasy on Alf’s part:  he returns to reality with his chronically disparaging father telling him his song’s no good.  We never do get confirmation that Alf breaks into the big time.  Herbie and co meanwhile simply disappear from the story.  Carreras makes clear the show is over by having the main cast line up on the screen for a virtual curtain call – it seems a mark of desperation as much as an acknowledgement of the piece’s stage origins.  So What a Crazy World starts off offensive and ends up a mess – but I’m very pleased to have seen it.

    4 September 2020

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