We won’t know the Oscar nominations until Monday, but it’s very likely France’s submission, Les Misérables, will be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. Directed and co-written by Ladj Ly (along with Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti, who also stars), it’s neither a direct adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel about the French revolution or a remake of the close-up-heavy Tom Hooper musical from a few years ago. Rather, it’s an ensemble piece about social unrest and police brutality that takes place in one of present day Paris’s banlieues.
The closest the film has to a protagonist is Damien Bonnard’s Stéphane Ruiz, an officer who just transferred from a less fraught precinct and is placed with an arrogant and clearly racist cop, Chris (Manenti), and his partner, Gwada (Djibril Zonga). When Issa (Issa Perica), a delinquent living in the predominantly black and muslim banlieue, kidnaps a lion cub from a visiting circus, violence threatens to break out unless the officers can return the animal, and their pursuit of Issa sets off an increasingly violent and tense series of events.
To Americans steeped in conversations driven by Black Lives Matter over the last few years, the stakes are clear and we have an idea of what might happen even if we don’t know exactly how. And while some elements of Ly’s film subvert those expectations–particularly the ending–so much of what happens feels so predictable and cliché that its ideas can ultimately feel a bit shallow.
From the beginning, the script works in broad strokes. As we follow Ruiz on his first day at the new precinct, we know he’s supposed to be the good cop from the way his timid demeanor contrasts with not just his new partners, but their jaded chief. When we follow the trio out on their first patrol, we know not only that Chris is a racist, but that he’ll likely spark whatever violence must be coming after he harasses a couple of teenaged girls smoking pot at a bus stop. The way he insults them and smashes their phones when they start to film his aggression is the kind of casual misogyny and megalomania we’ve seen from a hundred bad cops before him and the film does little to elaborate on that archetype or any of the others present here.
Still, that thin and familiar characterization wouldn’t be such a problem if what the film did with them were consistently surprising or challenging. The film’s inciting bit of violence is genuinely shocking and each succeeding decision the officers or the civilians make escalates the tension. When violence does break out, it’s made even more pivotal when it’s revealed it was caught on camera, and so on and so on with each plot turn. It’s really clever, exciting filmmaking—which is why it’s so disappointing when the film pierces that tension by not just oversimplifying things, but undermining its own point.
It’s hard to talk about the film’s mistakes without spoiling its surprises, but it basically boils down to perspective. By keeping the audience with the cops for so much of the film and foregrounding their emotions and moral struggles in the film’s tensest moments, Les Misérables unintentionally creates a false equivalency between what the cops and civilians experience. Rather than focus on the way systemic abuses of power have led to the mistrust and disdain Issa and his neighbors feels for the cops, the film ends up foregrounding the cops’ struggle to do what should already be a basic tenet of their jobs. Not becoming a racist monster driven my moral relativism isn’t heroic, it’s the bare minimum.
Though Les Misérables‘s explosive ending is effective as both catharsis and warning, its brilliance doesn’t quite make up for the lack of nuance in the rest. Though Ly is deliberately working in metaphors, the points he’s making ultimately feel shallow. Poverty, racial discrimination, police acting without consequence, we already know these things are bad and Ly’s film doesn’t do anything but present them. Sure, it’s thrilling to watch his film subvert the usual ending, but the whole film feels so divorced from reality that even that triumph can only feel like fantasy.
