Les Misérables: scenes from banlieues of Paris - Financial Times
Late in 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron saw a film that left him shaken. The movie was Les Misérables — not the long-running musical, but a kinetic portrait of life in the banlieues, the socially deprived and often riot-torn suburbs that encircle Paris. Montfermeil, one such place, is the scuffed commune at the eastern edge of Paris where, in the 19th century, Victor Hugo located his own “wretches”.
That May, the film had caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival. By November, it was Oscar-nominated as Best International Film. When Macron got in touch to request a preview, Malian-French director Ladj Ly offered a screening in Montfermeil amid the social housing of Les Bosquets (“The Groves”) where the story unfolds. The president declined, so Ly supplied a DVD. Macron watched it at the Elysée Palace. The experience, it was reported, unnerved him enough to demand that his officials create a programme to rescue the banlieues.
In the weeks to come, as the film became a huge domestic hit, advisers contacted Ly to request their own copy. “Macron’s order was, ‘You have to see Les Misérables’,” Ly says. The pause that follows is as dry as pauses get. “They were surprised too.”
With Les Misérables originally to be released in the UK this spring, we first met in London’s Hazlitt Hotel in March, days before France locked down. Ly — rangy, bearded, tired but genial — spoke through an interpreter. Five months later, the conversation is picked up remotely with the director in Montfermeil, where he has spent the confinement of 2020. The last movie to bring such attention to the banlieues, 1995’s La Haine, was directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, a film-maker from central Paris; Les Misérables is made by one who grew up and still lives in Les Bosquets, like most of his cast. “When our stories are told,” he says, “we want to be involved.”
If the title feels audacious, the film is too: a raw, epic tale of the banlieues and the cops who police them, some thuggish, others conflicted. Made for just €1.4m, around 2m tickets were sold in France before the pandemic. It is, Ly is aware, the kind of number that “breaks the door down”. While the South Korean thriller Parasite — another story of a toxic class system — won the international Oscar, Les Misérables claimed the 2020 French César for Best Film.
“I’m the first black guy to win a César,” Ly says. “I won’t say that has no importance.” Does he now expect more black filmmakers to be embraced by French cinema? “It is always a battle.” The CNC — the film agency of the Ministry of Culture — chose not to fund Les Misérables. Unlike Macron’s advisers, Ly was unsurprised. “It’s a film about social crisis and police corruption. That will upset some people.” Naturally, he says with a smile, the decision-makers involved are now vocal fans of the film.
During the delay to the UK release of Les Misérables, Black Lives Matter has spot-lit much of what inspired it. In Paris this summer, protesters chanted the name of Adama Traoré, who died after arrest in 2016. Places such as Les Bosquets, Ly says — where communities of African and Arab heritage face mass unemployment — have been “abandoned by the Republic”. He likens the situation to apartheid: “The BLM movement was inevitable. The situation in France has long been at a critical point. The fight against racism and police violence was never visible enough.”
Ly often speaks of visibility — what is seen and unseen and by whom. He grew up in 1980s Montfermeil, the son of Malian immigrants. His father worked as a refuse collector. Les Bosquets was tense even then. “But when you start out in a troubled environment, you regard it as normal.” By his teens, his school was encouraging him to train as an electrician. Contact between the banlieues and the cultural riches of central Paris were rare — such is the design of the city — but a childhood friend of a childhood friend was Romain Gavras, son of film-maker Costa-Gavras. At 17, intrigued, Ly bought a cheap digital video camera. It became a constant companion.
“I never thought, ‘I want to make feature films.’ I was already making films.” He trained his lens on everything — friends, family, the quotidian routines of Les Bosquets. “Then I started filming the police.”
A decade later, using cameraphones to record encounters with the police would be common practice worldwide. In the early 2000s, Ly became an accidental pioneer — police harassment was so rife in Les Bosquets, he says, that he kept running into it. He soon noticed that his presence — or that of his camera — made officers newly observant of protocol. Soon, local residents called for Ly whenever police cars appeared.
In 2005, as riots erupted in Paris’s suburbs, Ly refined the purpose of his camera. He assembled a documentary, 365 Days in Clichy-Montfermeil, then released it online. The audience was significant. For years, Ly continued to film police misconduct and make documentaries.
There were, he says, repercussions. “My camera made the police angry.” He estimates he has been arrested 50 times. After a 2009 incident involving a dispute in Les Bosquets, he was convicted for “complicity” in what was formally described as a kidnapping. (He was not accused of violence.) Further convictions included adding “outrageous commentary” to a video of police activity and a “verbal assault” on the mayor of Montfermeil after a fatal local fire. These charges were brought, he says, to stop his filmmaking. “I didn’t stop.”
A short version of Les Misérables was made in 2017. When the budget for the feature came together the next summer, fate handed Ly a moment of spectacular verité — untold numbers of Parisians, including his young cast, crowding the city to watch the French football team win the World Cup. As witnessed in the film, the scene was one of euphoric, multiracial unity. “Then the next day, it was like it never happened.”
On screen, reality is everywhere. If you assume the theft of a lion cub from a circus to be poetic licence, the director keeps a photo on his phone of the actual incident. And where he once had his all-seeing video camera, now a teenage boy films the police with an iPad and drone — the character being played by Ly’s son, Al-Hassan.
Al-Hassan Ly and his drone appear too in the short film his father made this year for the Netflix lockdown project Homemade. The camera floats above Les Bosquets, then descends to socially distanced food markets. “Like in the US, UK and Brazil,” Ly says, “Covid has accentuated French inequalities.”
Back in 2019, a Cannes premiere was ardently reviewed. Ly won the festival Jury Prize. “Afterwards nothing was the same.” Yet as word of the film spread, global news filled with other scenes of French crisis — the protests of the gilets jaunes. Ly felt sympathy for their cause while being struck by the intense media attention they got. “In the banlieues, we were gilets jaunes for 20 years. But we are immigrants, so we are invisible. TV only comes when a car is burning.”
The camera, he suggests, must change hands. Ly has long been involved with the Kourtajmé collective, which is now opening a string of free film schools. “A drop in the ocean, but it’s something.” The success of Les Misérables, he goes on, provides a model for banlieusard teens. But his optimism has limits. When I ask if young people in Les Bosquets have more chance of acceptance in middle-class Paris now than his generation did, his answer is immediate: “Less.”
Whatever Macron’s zeal, policy ideas have yet to emerge in response to the film. “Education and culture would be a start. They give you a voice, so privileged people keep them for themselves.” After the Elysée Palace screening, the French press much enjoyed Macron’s seeming obliviousness to life beyond the 8th arrondissement. Ly is pragmatic. You can’t fix a problem you don’t see, he says. “But now he has seen it.”
‘Les Misérables’ will have outdoor screenings in London on August 25 and goes on release in UK cinemas in September
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2020-08-20 04:01:38Z
https://www.ft.com/content/26bf39e0-1b67-4e92-8167-056c64d8ff44
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