The EconomistFebruary 8th 2020 Books & arts 732 as a “warning cry”. As an aspirant film-
maker, he used to record the real police vio-
lence he witnessed, and this eye lends the
film its authenticity. President Emmanuel
Macron is said to have been taken aback
after watching a private screening at the
Elysée Palace.
“Les Misérables” thus fits into a rising
trend towards a new, unabashed social
frankness in French film-making. Even in
the wake of “La Haine”, for the most part
“French auteur cinema tends to be very
middle-class, looking at the Parisian mi-
crocosm,” says Ginette Vincendeau, pro-
fessor of film studies at King’s College Lon-
don. “When it comes to social realism, we
often refer to British cinema, and the films
of Ken Loach, and say that we don’t have
this in France.”
Beyond the bourgeoisie
Now that seems to be changing. A number
of recent French films have taken a hard,
often bittersweet look at contemporary so-
cial issues. As French politics has been up-
ended by Mr Macron, film-makers seem to
have spied an opportunity to make new ar-
guments, and ask new questions, on the
big screen—in an echo of the experimenta-
tion in French cinema in the 1950s and
1960s. Last year alone, such movies ex-
plored educational disadvantage (“La Vie
Scolaire”, “La Lutte des Classes”), farming
and rural suicide (“Au Nom de la Terre”), re-
dundancy and factory closure (“En
Guerre”) and society’s attitude to autism
(“Hors Normes”).
Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, the
pair behind “Hors Normes”, made their
name with “Intouchables”, a blockbuster
comedy. In their latest film they turn to the
efforts of two social workers in Paris (one
played by Vincent Cassel, who memorably
starred in “La Haine”) to offer shelter and
purpose to severely autistic youngsters
whom the social-welfare system fails.
When the central autistic character, Joseph
(Benjamin Lesieur), pulls the alarm in the
metro, it serves as a wider metaphor. “The
important thing”, Mr Nakache has said, is
“to break the taboo on certain subjects”.
As a movie, “Hors Normes” has touch-
ing moments, although in the end its mes-
sage gets in the way of a truly compelling
drama. Such is the risk with the genre. The
politically engaged films made in the 1990s
after “La Haine” were also of patchy quality.
Nor are these politically sensitive films al-
ways simple to finance. “Les Misérables” it-
self struggled, initially winning no backing
from official French cinematic institu-
tions. Still, whether or not Mr Ly’s disturb-
ing, sharply observed story claims an Osc-
ar, in France, at least, it has already made its
mark. “It’s good that French film is offering
something other than bourgeois cinema,”
says Mr Barral, the co-producer. “Perhaps
people have had enough of that.” 7L
eotolstoywasaninveteratequitter.All
his life, he gave up the things that mat-
tered to him, or tried to. He bolted from
university without a degree, left the army,
renounced the privileges of aristocracy. He
rejected the Orthodox church and abjured
fiction as a vanity. He forswore the libertin-
ism of his youth, and—eventually—fled his
tortured marriage, in the fatal escape that
ended at the railway station in Astapovo.
This urge to shed distractions and com-
mitments is one of the continuities that
Andrei Zorin, a cultural historian at Ox-
ford, traces in his beautiful account of Tol-
stoy’s long, astonishing life. Born in 1828 at
Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate, Tolstoy
studied in Kazan, fought in the Caucasus,
became the world’s most famous author
and founded what amounted to a new reli-
gion. He was an avid farmer, an education
reformer and a champion of famine relief.
Strive as he might to repudiate fame, in 1910
the world’s media besieged the station-
master’s house as he lay dying inside.
Death had preoccupied him since his
service in Crimea (his depiction of the
wastefulness of the war led to an early
run-in with the tsarist censors). But sex
preoccupied him more. Notoriously, be-
fore their wedding he made Sofia, his much
younger fiancée, read the diary he began
while being treated for gonorrhoea, which
detailed his liaisons with prostitutes and
concubines; the marriage was consum-mated in the carriage after the service. His
libido was matched by his remorse and
self-disgust. He wept beside the bed in
which he lost his virginity; even his desire
for Sofia came to seem “loathsome” and
“criminal”. The hero of “Father Sergius”,
one of his late stories that were published
posthumously, is a penitent aristocrat who
takes holy orders and cuts off a finger to
ward off temptation.
Tolstoy’s ceaseless interrogation of So-
fia’s feelings and his own helped make
their relationship excruciating. In their
last decades, amid a lifetime’s worth of re-
sentments and mounting bereavements, it
became intolerable. (“There is no death,”
Tolstoy intoned as he trudged in the snow
after the youngest of their 13 children per-
ished in 1895.) At the end, after Tolstoy fi-
nally walked out, Sofia was banished from
his deathbed in Astapovo and had to peer at
him through the window. Yet it was in this
agonising marriage that he produced “War
and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.
In an ingenious, seamless approach
that distinguishes his biography from oth-
ers, Mr Zorin treats the events of Tolstoy’s
life and his writing as a single, indivisible
whole. As he says, the genius of Tolstoy’s
art lay in its combination of verisimilitude
and depth: “from any occasion, however
trivial it may seem, he is ready to derive
major conclusions about humankind.” He
sketches his subject’s relations with Gorky,
Turgenev, Chekhov (whose plays Tolstoy
thought very bad) and Dostoyevsky (over
whose death Tolstoy wept, though they
never met). He notes the political upheav-
als, above all the emancipation of the serfs,
which were the novels’ wider context.
In a country where other forms of au-
thority were discredited, writers had a spe-
cial, oracular status. Still, for Tolstoy, liter-
ary acclaim came to seem meaningless.
Writing fiction was not the way to improve
the world; as with the pleasures of the
flesh, he berated himself when he lapsed
into it again. (Rereading “War and Peace”,
he felt “repentance and shame...not unlike
what a man experiences when he sees the
remains of an orgy in which he has taken
part.”) His political and moral views—anar-
chistic, radical, anti-modern—fused in a
heretical new version of Christianity and a
dissident activism, at once cranky and he-
roic, which made him a star all over again.
His creed rejected all kinds of violence and
oppression, which, for him, included the
strictures of lust as well as state power.
On the eve of his death he was still in-
veighing against capital punishment. He
was buried at Yasnaya Polyana—which, Mr
Zorin observes, he left many times but, un-
like many other attachments, he never
abandoned—in a glade where, as a child, he
hunted for a magical stick that could rid the
world of evil. His unmarked, turf-covered
grave has an aura of eerie calm. 7Literature and beyondMarriage story
Leo Tolstoy. By Andrei Zorin.Reaktion
Books; 224 pages; $19 and £11.99Many lives in one