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