Director Ladj Ly reimagines Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables in contemporary France. With the same name, Ly’s semi-autobiographical foreign film submission earned the Jury award at Cannes in 2019.
Ly’s adaptation draws on his own experiences in Clichy-Montfermeil. In this French neighborhood, Ly made his first documentary short, “Montfermeil,” following a series of riots against law enforcement.
The film has won the Jury Prize at the Cannes. Furthermore, it was selected as France’s international feature film Oscar submission. This marks the first time France has chosen a black filmmaker to represent it at the Oscars, while Ly joined Mati Diop among the first black filmmakers to win awards at Cannes.
Ladj Ly Reflects Current Tensions
Les Misérables focuses on three members of an anti-crime brigade. After a boy captures a violent encounter on camera, they race to stop him from exposing them.
Multiple tensions develop simultaneously in the film: the police vs. the youth, police vs. local Muslim Brothers, police vs. community advocates, and police members against one another. The central figure of the film, a young boy named Issa, is of mixed race, to reflect Ly’s message that “when you look a little more closely, France is multicultural.”
His own son, Al-Hassan Ly, has a role as the boy whose drone accidentally films the plot’s inciting incident. The characters echo Hugo’s with an inside view of what Paris is now, more than 100 years later.
Carrying on Hugo’s Tradition
With the same name and similar tensions, Ly set out to highlight similarities between Hugo’s Paris and that of today. The neighborhood in which Ly grew up and still lives strongly echoes the Paris of the original Les Misérables: “it remains grim, comprised of poor and disenfranchised people – primarily African immigrants – who often clash with the authorities,” Ly explains.
The 2005 Paris riots strongly influenced Ly as well. “We talk of the left and the right political parties, but for the youth in my community, neither one speaks to them, which leads to frustration and desperation, and then revolt,” he says. “Misery is still the same. The only things that changed, maybe, are that people are more up to date and the color of their skin.”
These riots resulted in Ly’s “guerrilla journalism” piece called “365 Days in Clichy-Montfermeil” which illustrated the gap in media coverage and the actual events in Ly’s own neighborhood. He took advantage of the passion and discontent in his neighborhood, “taking all the truth we could get from this neighborhood and making it into fiction.” The crew went door-to-door, recruiting locals for mass scenes, and many of the episodes in the film are scenes from his own life, growing up in this part of Paris.
Ladj Ly Draws on Documentary Experience
Ly hopes that his documentary style of film, in being loyal to reality, can inspire people in reality. “I believe in the power of cinema as a tool to inspire revolution to challenge the status quo, and bring real lasting change,” he said. “Some people might be confused or uncomfortable by that sequence. But I hope that in their confusion, they will stop and think about why.”
“Everything you saw is inspired by real facts,” he explains. “And this is my first film of fiction. But it is a testimony to everything I have experienced over the last 20 or 30 years as I’ve grown up in that neighborhood. So everything you see are experiences that I have lived firsthand.”
The film is currently available on limited release from Amazon Studios, as well as in some specialty movie theaters.
