08/09/20

This is not, as you might reasonably have expected, a musical featuring people in period costume running around Paris and warbling endlessly about the French revolution. This Palme D’or Jury winner is a gritty, contemporary drama, set in Montfermeil where Victor Hugo penned his most famous novel. It’s now been transformed into an edgy, crime-ridden neighbourhood where drugs and prostitution are rife and where different cultures struggle for supremacy.

New cop on the block, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard) finds himself teamed with veteran twosome, Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djibril Zonga) and his first day on the job becomes a brutal schooling in the art of bending the rules. Chris and Gwada have established their own way of doing things and it’s made very clear from the get-go, that Stéphane is expected to fall into line. But when hard-knock kid Issa (Issa Perica) steals a lion cub from a travelling circus, he unwittingly sparks off a whole series of events that threaten to erupt into violence on a major scale.

Writer/director Ladj Ly rarely puts a foot wrong here. He’s careful to ensure that nobody is allowed to become a total villain, just as surely as nobody is picked out as a hero. The entire cast of Les Miserables exist somewhere in a twilight hinterland somewhere in between the two. These are people trying to keep their heads above water in a hard-bitten world that takes no prisoners; and when the young black gangs that haunt the area feel compelled to rise up in a revolution of their own, it’s hard not to sympathise with their plight. They represent a strata of society that are being punished for just daring to exist.

As Ly steadily cranks up the heat beneath his characters, so the tension rises and the story exert an increasingly powerful grip, until it all explodes into a cataclysmic – and brilliantly judged – crescendo.

This is incendiary stuff that will have you gripped from start to finish.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney