Let us pry, though not too deeply, into the minds and the motives of those who decide when a film should be released. Victor Hugo would watch this film and weep. So much for the soccer-loving boy, draped in the national flag. What I do know is that the look on Issa’s face, in the final shot, is swollen with such unappeasable contempt for the established order of things that the future, not just for France, seems suddenly and hopelessly dark. There’s no denying the fervor of the conflict that ensues, up and down the stairwells of the projects, but do we need it? Would Ly not have done better to let “Les Misérables” hang fire at dusk, the evening before? I can’t decide.
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The movie flickers back to life like a Terminator, plowing onward for another twenty minutes or more, and the sense of suspended animation is snapped everything that has hitherto been hinted at-the will to rebel, a deep resentment of the state, the furies of disenfranchised youth-now erupts. You feel exhausted yet satisfied somehow, for now, Ruiz and his comrades have kept anarchy at bay. The mood appears to die down, in twilit tranquillity, at the close of Ruiz’s début day, with Les Bosquets gilded by the sun’s last rays. The dénouement of the film left me split in two. So what will Buzz do with the memory card from the drone? And can, or should, Pink Pig prevent its contents going viral? He is grievously wounded by one of his pursuers-precisely the sort of incident that could stoke a riot. The drone is equipped with a camera, and, pretty much by accident, it captures video footage of Issa, who is wanted for questioning, being chased by the S.C.U. Hence the importance of Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly), a harmless kid with a potentially damaging drone at his command on a lark, he flies it from the roof of his apartment building, in Les Bosquets, the infamous projects of Montfermeil. The gesture is a telling one, because-in France as elsewhere-what actually happens in any flash point between suspects and officers of the law matters less than what can be proved to have happened. When one girl tries to film him, mid-provocation, he grabs her phone and throws it to the ground. His idea of fun is to confront teen-age girls at a bus stop and sniff their fingers, claiming to smell drugs. Chris’s nickname is Pink Pig, and he’s happy to accept it-revelling in his reputation as a brute, truffling for trouble and, if necessary, creating it where none exists. In practice, his job involves cruising around the district in the company of Chris (Alexis Manenti), his feral superior, with their cool-tempered colleague Gwada (Djebril Zonga) at the wheel. (Ly himself grew up there, and Fantine, the long-suffering heroine of Hugo’s book, goes there with her daughter.) We tag along with a taciturn fellow named Ruiz (Damien Bonnard), who is reporting for duty on his first day with the local police specifically, with the Street Crimes Unit, or S.C.U. The rest of the film, unfolding in the wake of the sporting triumph, is set almost entirely in Montfermeil. Up comes the title, in huge letters: “Les Misérables.” Ouf. When the French win the Cup (Mbappé having scored their final goal), we are shown the Champs-Élysées, crammed with a merry mob: the ultimate image of a festive, multiethnic, and self-confident nation, whose chanting citizens have laid aside their differences and united in joy. Their ardor is inflamed by pride, for the brightest young star on the French team, Kylian Mbappé, hails from Bondy, not far west of Montfermeil, the rough suburb where Issa lives Mbappé is the son of a Cameroonian father and an Algerian mother, and most of the characters mustering in “Les Misérables,” likewise, are of African descent-as is Ladj Ly, the movie’s director, who was born in Mali. In Paris, thousands upon thousands of people are gathering to watch the game in bars, or on public screens, and Issa and his buddies join the throng. It’s July 15, 2018, and France is playing Croatia in the World Cup final. “Bet you five that Mbappé scores,” he says to a friend, at which point any soccer fans in the audience will know just what’s going on. And the first thing we see is a kid named Issa (Issa Perica) wearing a French tricolor as if it were a cape, with a matching daub of red, white, and blue on his cheek. On the other hand, we do hear the populace singing en masse-in the opening minutes, with the credits still under way. Alas, the new “Les Misérables” really is new, and crushingly Crowe-free, and although a quotation from Victor Hugo is tacked onto the end, the story bears only the faintest relation to his enormous novel. That would certainly be a pleasure one should never spurn the opportunity to watch Russell Crowe singing slightly too high for (a) his manly britches and (b) his peace of mind. Many moviegoers, noting the arrival of “Les Misérables,” will assume that Tom Hooper’s musical extravaganza of 2012 has been granted a rerelease.