‘ FILM IS
A TOOL:
IT CHANGES
THINGS’
An explosive tale of police brutality and racial tensions on the
margins of French society, Ladj Ly’s gripping ‘Les Misérables’ revisits
life in the Parisian banlieues 25 years after ‘La Haine’. Here he talks
to Elena Lazic about fighting to create a space for filmmaking
outside the country’s often insular mainstream channelsSTREETS AHEAD
Les Misérables is the debut
feature by director Ladj Ly,
and the first of a planned
trilogy, but he has been
active within the French film
cooperative Kourtrajmé for
many years making shortsarly in director Ladj Ly’s feature debut Les Mi-
sérables, a drone takes flight, and we look down
from its vantage point as it soars above the tough
Parisian banlieue of Les Bosquets in Montfermeil. Al-
though it lies only a little over 10 miles north-east of the
centre of Paris, life in Montfermeil is a world away, and the
shot gives us a bird’s-eye view of a part of Paris which most
of us only know from watching the news. Montfermeil,
which was also the location of the inn run by the villain-
ous Thénardiers in the epic 1862 Victor Hugo novel that
gave Ly’s film its title, can seem peaceful from such a dis-
tance, its troubles at a safe remove, but Ly’s film will also
plunge us down to street level, into the tinderbox of ten-
sions that exist among its residents – and from them to-
wards the police. Set over two fraught days, the film offers
an insider’s view of such tensions – which Ly himself wit-
nessed growing up in Montfermeil, most devastatingly in
2005, when riots followed an instance of police brutality
that led to the deaths of two teenagers – events that
in part inspired Les Misérables. PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LAISNÉ/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGESE
36 | Sight&Sound | May 2020