The lion doesn’t sleep tonight
LES MISÉRABLES, Ladj Ly’s Oscar-nominated Cannes award-winner, is a powerful indictment of structural neglect in the Parisian projects disguised as a police procedural
Here’s what is so interesting about Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables: it’s a problem picture that makes clear there is no solution if you’re part of the problem. It’s about what happens when the system, more than any one person, is the problem, and unable or unwilling to come up with a solution.
Ly knows what he’s talking about: he is a child of the cités, the Paris suburban projects where planned urbanism went wrong in every possible way and ended up creating self-fulfilling ghettos. What he is portraying, powerfully, in his first fiction feature after a series of shorts and documentaries made with the Montfermeil collaborative collective Kourtrajmé, is what the residents of this area experience daily: police harassment, parental misunderstandings or absences, ex-cons trying to go straight, relapsing or finding religion, tweens and teenagers let loose in a jungle not of their own making. If you mess with the lion, you’re gonna get mauled.
It’s not wonder a lion features prominently in the plotline of these slightly over 24 hours in the life of the suburbs — a lion cub to…
