Les Misérables

Stéphane, a newcomer to the Anti-Crime Squad, transfers to Montfermeil, the eastern Paris suburb where Victor Hugo set his famous novel. On his first days he is paired with two experienced partners, Chris and Gwada, who introduce him to their beat by way of a patrol that is less law enforcement than a daily negotiation: with street vendors, with teenage boys, with the self-appointed power brokers who keep a fragile peace on the estate.

That peace is disturbed when a boy named Issa steals a lion cub, Johnny, from a travelling circus. The circus owner, Zorro, storms to the local community leader known as "the Mayor" and threatens to come back armed if the animal is not returned. What begins as an absurd errand — find a lion in a housing project — pulls the three officers through every faction in the neighbourhood, each with its own claim on the territory.

When the squad is overwhelmed during an arrest, a drone hovering above the courtyard records what happens. Ladj Ly's debut feature compresses all of this into roughly a single day, building from documentary-like observation to a thriller whose tension comes less from a mystery than from watching adults in uniform discover how little control they actually have.

Ly closes the film with Hugo's line — "there are no such things as bad plants or bad men; there are only bad cultivators" — and that sentence is the thesis. The film argues that the violence erupting on the estate is not an expression of anyone's nature but a harvest: the predictable yield of decades of neglect, policing-by-humiliation, and adults who treat children as bargaining chips in their own power games.

Crucially, Ly refuses to make this a story of villains and victims. The cops are not monsters and the kids are not innocents; the Mayor, the Muslim Brotherhood figures, the dealers and the police all operate a system that works for them and is paid for by the youngest. Ly, who grew up in Montfermeil as the son of a Malian immigrant and has been filming the neighbourhood for more than a decade, has described the film as an alarm bell rather than an indictment — a warning delivered by someone who lives there, insisting that people from the banlieue tell their own story instead of having it told for them.

The ending as deliberate suspension. The freeze on Stéphane's raised gun and Issa's lit Molotov, cutting to black before either acts, has been read as a refusal to grant catharsis: the film hands the decision to the viewer, making the outcome a question about what we believe these two people are capable of.

Arriving as a debut feature in competition at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival, Les Misérables became one of the most widely discussed French films of its year: it took the Jury Prize at Cannes, then collected twelve César nominations and four wins, including Best Film. Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus summarised the reaction — the film "transcends its unwieldy story with compelling ideas and an infectious energy that boils over during a thrilling final act."

Its cultural weight comes from who made it. Ly's authorship — a filmmaker from Montfermeil, the son of a Malian immigrant, who has documented the estate for over a decade and still lives there — reframed a genre long dominated by outsiders looking in. As Ly put it in interviews, "people tend to tell our story in our name." The film consequently functioned as a political event as much as a cinematic one, read in France as an alarm bell about policing, the banlieues and the state's relationship to its poorest citizens.

It also placed itself deliberately in a literary lineage. By borrowing Hugo's title and closing on Hugo's words, Ly claimed continuity with the nineteenth century's great novel of social abandonment while stripping out its religious framework and adding the racial and ethnic dimensions that define the contemporary suburbs — an argument that France's misérables never stopped existing, only changed address and complexion.

Praised: Viewers and critics responded above all to the film's energy and escalating tension — the widely cited critical consensus credits it with "compelling ideas and an infectious energy that boils over during a thrilling final act." The performances of the three leads, the documentary-grade authenticity of the estate (a direct result of Ly's decade of filming there and the actors' patrols with real police), and the refusal to reduce anyone to a type were repeatedly singled out. Audience scores reflected this enthusiasm, with the film holding a strong user rating on IMDb (around 7.6/10).

Criticised: The most common reservation concerns the screenplay's shape — the same consensus that praises the film concedes an "unwieldy story," and some viewers found the first act's survey of neighbourhood factions closer to sociological tour than drama. Others felt the lion-cub premise strained credibility against the realist texture, or that the closing Hugo quotation spelled out a message the images had already delivered.

Divisive: The ending is the flashpoint. Cutting to black on a raised gun and a lit Molotov reads to some as a masterstroke of moral suspension and to others as an evasion. A parallel debate concerns balance: viewers disagree over whether Ly's even-handed portrait of cops and kids is honest humanism or a softening of the power asymmetry the film otherwise documents.

Verdict: An overwhelmingly well-received debut, validated by the Cannes Jury Prize and four César wins including Best Film, admired more for its urgency, authenticity and final act than for its plotting.