Despite its bold title, there is nary a candlestick or a musket in sight in Ladj Ly's Cannes Jury Prize-winning and Oscar-nominated film.
Instead, the French-Malian director mines his autobiography to unleash a powder keg drama of cops and pissed-off kids that detonates in the suburbs outside of Paris during the summer of 2018.
Known as the banlieues, France's low-income housing projects are widely seen as eyesores — failed experiments of the post-war era, now synonymous with unemployment, social exclusion and racial segregation.
Their communities have been depicted vividly in French cinema, from the delicate Girlhood (2014) to the macho swagger of La Haine (1995).
But until now the Bosquets — the projects in Montfermeil — were most familiar from salacious news reports about the 2005 "riots", which erupted after two young boys died while hiding from police (at the time, future president Nicholas Sarkozy referred to the protestors as "scum").
Following several attention-grabbing documentaries and shorts, Les Miserables is Ly's first narrative feature and his latest effort to document his home suburb, showing audiences another side of one of the country's most "infamous" banlieues.
"We're in the Bosquets, you heard of it?" laughs the officer Gwada (Djebril Zonga), as the cop car cruises the projects.
In a clever twist on a stock set-up, it's the first day on the job for Stephane (Damien Bonnard, channelling his bewildered screenwriter from Staying Vertical), who has just transferred from the provinces to the blustering anti-crimes brigade.
He's been partnered with an unlikely buddy duo: the easy-going Gwada and the erratic, abusive squad leader Chris (Alexis Manenti), proudly known as "Pink Pig".
After a perfunctory warning in the station from their boss (Jeanne Balibar) against "inappropriate behaviour", Chris quickly lives up to his nickname when he stops to frisk some teenage girls at a bus stop, going so far as to smell their fingertips.
One starts filming him — "You have no right!" — before Chris snatches the phone from her and smashes it on the footpath.
Without labouring its point, Les Miserables telescopes between crushing quotidian encounters like this and the neglect of public services that is visible at every turn: elevators are broken, walls are crumbling and uncollected garbage bags lay in piles across the concretescape.
Such conditions might appear ripe for an outing in social-realist miserabilism, the sort of film where people sit around and watch paint peel.
But Ly — taking a firm step away from his documentary roots towards a not-quite-so-conventional police thriller — soon picks up the pace. The piles of trash are transformed into obstacles to be leapt over in hyperkinetic chase scenes as the three cops hotfoot it in pursuit of a young mixed-race boy, Issa (Issa Perica).
It seems his petty theft of a lion cub from a travelling Romani circus — an absurdist touch that is pulled off delightfully, and part of an undercurrent of black comedy — threatens to spin the already volatile neighbourhood into all-out chaos. The cops have 24 hours to get the precious cat back.
The clock is suddenly ticking and the action is intensified by a buzzing, eerie electro score from Pink Noise (a member of the area's famed Kourtrajme artist collective, alongside Ly).
The horror ratchets up dramatically when, during a heated confrontation, Issa is shot in the eye with a flash-ball gun (a controversial weapon used by French police) — and the incident is captured by a drone, out on a break from perving through girls' bedroom windows.
Aghast, Stephane cradles Issa's unconscious body. But Issa has become a secondary concern to everyone else, as the rival factions — the self-appointed mayor (Steve Tientcheu), the Muslim Brotherhood, drug dealers and aggrieved packs of kids — race to find the owner of the footage, afraid of what might happen if it goes public.
As Stephane stumbles through this complex social order — positioned as the viewer's emotional proxy — the film ingeniously works a perspective that feels both inside and outside.
Similar to La Haine's gliding shots, the use of the drone ruptures the gritty handheld aesthetic to open up new vantage points, buzzing over the tops of buildings and briefly lightening the mood.
Ly disguises none of the squalor of the projects, but he also shows us kids euphoric over France's World Cup victory or simply goofing about, as well as mothers pooling resources through a tontine, to support each other when the state seems to have all but forgotten them.
Indeed, the film displays some empathy for everyone stuck in this hell, offering humanising glimpses of the terror on the cops' faces and their life at home too.
"There are no such things as bad plants or bad men," the film quotes Victor Hugo's eponymous novel, "There are only bad cultivators."
Then, just when you think it's all over, Ly rips out a revelatory third act that sees events explode all over again, propelled by a flood of adolescent anger.
Issa emerges as their leader, grotesquely scarred but terrifyingly self-possessed — teasingly suggesting the rise of a mythical supervillain, as Ly takes the drama into another realm.
By showing the lived effects of oppression and their haunting consequences, Ly scrambles any cookie-cutter notions of goodies and baddies.
In doing so, he recalls 365 Days in Montfermeil, his chronicle of the 2005 protests, as well as Portrait of a Generation — an early street art project created with the artist JR, in which photos of people from the Bosquets toyed with the area's bad reputation.
Portrait of a Generation generated the now-iconic, arguably prophetic image of the teenage Ly, wielding what at first appears to be a gun but is actually a different kind of weapon: a video camera.
More than a decade later, Ly's hopeful, furious film seizes on this provocation. His camera intervenes to make audiences stop and really look at the world around them, as they ask themselves who the real scumbags are.
Les Miserables is in cinemas from August 27.
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2020-08-26 19:01:00Z
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