Les Misérables (2019)

Ladj Ly opens on the Champs-Élysées in July 2018, a nation briefly united by a football victory, then drives twenty minutes east to Montfermeil, where the same republic has arranged matters somewhat differently. His Anti-Crime Squad patrols the estate with the ease of men who own it, and the arrival of Stéphane, a newcomer with a conscience and an unhelpful haircut, supplies the witness. The cast is drawn largely from the community being filmed, Maghrebi and sub-Saharan residents of the banlieue, and the film grants them interiority without pausing to announce that it is doing so. That restraint is the film's chief virtue. It also keeps the sermonizing to a minimum, though the sermon is plainly there, waiting in the wings.

The racial analysis is the engine, and it is not subtle. We know exactly whose face receives the flash-ball, whose father has stopped answering the door, and which residents the state has chosen to manage instead of serve. The anger is aimed at neglect and at police impunity, not at capital as such. There is no billionaire to eat, only a Mayor with a cramped office and a circus owner with a lion. Women appear at the margins, and any other form of identity or social concern is simply absent, which in a film this tightly focused reads as discipline rather than oversight.

Ly ends in a stairwell, with a Molotov cocktail and two people deciding, then hands the last word to Victor Hugo on the subject of bad cultivators. It is a strong finish and a bleak one. The film was made with evident conviction and works as a thriller first, a thesis second, which is the correct order of operations. We classify it as a serious vintage: full-bodied, regional, unafraid of its own politics, and mercifully short on speeches. Whether the government that found it upsetting did anything about the banlieues is a question for another department.