Although the resolution is surprisingly anticlimactic, Les misérables pulses with a pervasive sense of injustice. It is a masterful time bomb that keeps ticking until close to the end.
France
4*
Director:
Ladj Ly
Screenwriter:
Ladj Ly
Director of Photography:
Julien Veron
Running time: 16 minutes
For most people (especially for a middle-class white man like me), the low-income suburbs of Paris have a quality of mystery around them similar to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Known as the banlieues, they are filled with expansive but dilapidated high-rise apartment blocks around half a century old. They are widely known as places of poverty and unrest, and in recent years they have been the venue for countless riots directed at the police. Films like City of God (Cidade de deus) and Hate (La haine) draw attention because they offer a glimpse of this eventful but often dangerous other world that is visible from the city centre (of Rio and Paris, respectively). They also make waves because of their politics and their skill at making this world accessible to a viewer who may be too scared to set foot there.
With a few caveats, let’s add Ladj Ly’s 16-minute Les misérables to the two aforementioned masterpieces. In this short film, a trial run for his acclaimed 2019 feature with the same name, the director sets two polar opposites against each other: a group of three policemen patrolling the streets of a notorious banlieue, Clichy-sous-Bois Montfermeil, and a trio of teenage boys, likely the sons or grandsons of immigrants, who are flying a drone over this (their) neighbourhood.
The policemen patrol the streets and harass the locals under the guise of laying down the law. But their approach is both verbally and physically violent, more than likely as a way of pre-emptively defending themselves against any potential enemy in this part of the city where they don’t belong. In an early scene, they drive past a bus stop where they see a young girl smoking. The loudest cop in the group, Chris, (arguably, sexually) assaults her in an effort to uncover any amount of drugs on her person. This confrontation is followed by another arbitrary shakedown and a violent altercation in which the police appear to shoot a defenceless boy.
But it is all captured thanks to the drone, whose owner the policemen do their best to track down and… assault. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Hate also deployed a drone (when the film was shot in the summer of 1994, such a thing didn’t exist, so the 27-year-old fashioned one out of a camera tied to a remote helicopter), and Ly clearly pays homage to his cinematic predecessor. This time, however, the point of view does not belong to God but to the very real technology of today. By 2017, surveillance drones had become commonplace in modern warfare, and while they can kill from far away, they can also record things that would otherwise remain unseen, as Dziga Vertov already made clear nearly a century ago.
Les misérables opens and closes on Laurent, the newest member of the police team. Having recently been transferred from the relatively quiet city of Poitiers, he has to balance the pressure of his peers to quash any alleged wrongdoing with his own moral code, which is more accommodating and less pugilistic. Between those bookends, a firestorm erupts and his life changes.
The best shorts show how quickly things can change. In his rush to string all the parts together, however, Ly botches not only his staging of the critical police assault but also the series of events leading up to the film’s (anti-)climax. It feels like essential contextual tissue was cut in order to bring the film in at a certain length, and we are left with a central scene that appears out of nowhere. The expected clash between the two trios of characters also fizzles out as the teenagers and their lives are all but ignored in the second half, which makes it less easy to empathise with them as people.
With an ominous bass line supporting the minimalist electronic score that builds ever higher, couching the latter’s optimism in a vague sense of dread, the film rises to its climax only to stumble momentarily at the finish line. And yet, this restless short film’s portrayal of the Parisian banlieue and the injustice of living under corrupt police rule in a supposedly democratic society is nothing if not visceral and in-your-face.