Post by Dracula on Mar 20, 2020 20:14:24 GMT -5
Les Misérables(1/20/2020)
Lest the title confuse you, Les Misérables is not an adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel of the same name and of course has nothing to do with the musical of the same title and instead joins a strange little trend of movies like Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation which jack the title of an earlier work in order to sort of respond to it. I think the film is set in the same neighborhood that Hugo’s novel was but in modern times and both works sort of focus on overly diligent police officers and the poor and downtrodden, otherwise there aren’t really overt similarities. Instead this actually has more in common with Training Day of all things as it’s about someone’s first day on the force in a tougher area than they’re used to and they end up embedded with people who are semi-corrupt and use varying degrees of excessive force throughout the film. This was France’s selection to compete in the Best International Film category at the Oscars, which was a controversial choice given that it beat out Portrait of a Lady on Fire and I suspect that this choice was made because Les Misérables spoke more directly to contemporary French society and from a French perspective spoke more for an unheard voice in society.
I can respect that but I must say that coming from the perspective of an American that’s spent much of the last half-decade following the discourse around the interactions between black people and police this all feels a little… lightweight. Like, most activists in this country wish the local police were only as bad as the ones in this movie because the ones they have to deal with are even worse. And looked at simply as a crime movie this also only succeeds within certain limits. Ladj Ly feels rather accomplished for a first time director and certainly helms the film with skill. He also seems to have some feel for the Parisian streets and the various subcultures that inhabit them and I kind of wish he had just made a movie about those people without the police butting into everything because I’m not sure he has much more of a grip on the psychology of law enforcement than your average TV procedural writer does. All that having been said, I don’t want to be too negative about the film. Scene to scene and moment to moment it is a nicely gritty addition to the cop movie genre and it shouldn’t be docked too many points just because I’ve grown so suspicious of that genre as a whole.
***1/2 out of Five
Lest the title confuse you, Les Misérables is not an adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel of the same name and of course has nothing to do with the musical of the same title and instead joins a strange little trend of movies like Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation which jack the title of an earlier work in order to sort of respond to it. I think the film is set in the same neighborhood that Hugo’s novel was but in modern times and both works sort of focus on overly diligent police officers and the poor and downtrodden, otherwise there aren’t really overt similarities. Instead this actually has more in common with Training Day of all things as it’s about someone’s first day on the force in a tougher area than they’re used to and they end up embedded with people who are semi-corrupt and use varying degrees of excessive force throughout the film. This was France’s selection to compete in the Best International Film category at the Oscars, which was a controversial choice given that it beat out Portrait of a Lady on Fire and I suspect that this choice was made because Les Misérables spoke more directly to contemporary French society and from a French perspective spoke more for an unheard voice in society.
I can respect that but I must say that coming from the perspective of an American that’s spent much of the last half-decade following the discourse around the interactions between black people and police this all feels a little… lightweight. Like, most activists in this country wish the local police were only as bad as the ones in this movie because the ones they have to deal with are even worse. And looked at simply as a crime movie this also only succeeds within certain limits. Ladj Ly feels rather accomplished for a first time director and certainly helms the film with skill. He also seems to have some feel for the Parisian streets and the various subcultures that inhabit them and I kind of wish he had just made a movie about those people without the police butting into everything because I’m not sure he has much more of a grip on the psychology of law enforcement than your average TV procedural writer does. All that having been said, I don’t want to be too negative about the film. Scene to scene and moment to moment it is a nicely gritty addition to the cop movie genre and it shouldn’t be docked too many points just because I’ve grown so suspicious of that genre as a whole.
***1/2 out of Five
