The French leader was so appalled by Les Misérables, a film about a riot in a tough banlieue, that he launched an investigation. The director of ‘the new La Haine’ talks about the country’s angry underclass
When Ladj Ly was a teenager, his mate stole a lion cub from the circus. The pair kept it in an apartment, but it cried for its mother, upset the neighbours – and the people who ran the circus demanded it be returned.
Fast forward two decades and Ly uses that real-life catnapping as narrative spur for his award-winning debut film Les Misérables. The setting is Montfermeil, a tough banlieue north-east of Paris where he was born and raised. Montfermeil is also the location of the Thénardiers’ inn in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables, the place where former convict Jean Valjean meets the orphan Cosette.
Ly is highlighting the continuities between 19th-century fiction and 21st-century reality: the misérables of present-day France are his neighbours, overwhelmingly families of African or Arabic heritage, suffering poverty, police racism, democratic deficit and official neglect. “The cub is clearly a metaphor for being deprived of freedom, of being unnaturally trapped,” he says. “The misery of Montfermeil has never been really addressed. We’re still trapped, still misunderstood, still underfunded.”
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2CINmmx
