Film Review: Jean Valjean Finds Grace In The Shadows

★★★½

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is a mighty house brick (or three) of a novel and has been adapted many times in multiple forms. Here, director and screenwriter Éric Besnard has concentrated on the first 150 pages or so in giving us an origin story at the heart of French identity.

Jean Valjean is a classic ‘hero’s journey’ from despair to redemption done with serious intent and respect for its source material. It’s brutal and raw, but not unforgiving.

In encroaching darkness, the hefty figure of Jean Valjean (Grégory Gadebois), newly released from 19 years in prison, approaches the town of Digne in southern France. He is looking for lodgings and desperate for food. But the stigma of criminality is etched into every crease of his face, and every door is shut in his face. Except one.

At the modest house of the Bishop, Monseigneur Bienvenu (Bernard Campan), Valjean is given food and a comfortable bed. Bienvenu lives with his consumptive sister, Baptistine (Isabelle Carré), and a devoted but distrustful maid, Mme Magloire (Alexandra Lamy).

A powder keg of barely contained self-destructive rage, Valjean is disconcerted by the compassion shown to him by Bienvenu. Will the Bishop’s humanity be sufficient to save the brutalised Valjean from himself? I think we know the answer, but the journey’s the thing.

Tackling foundational myths can be tricky, but with Jean Valjean, Besnard has made a pretty good fist of it. He’s tackling Big Themes here – inequality, justice, poverty of thought and action, forgiveness and redemption.

The film takes its subject matter very seriously – there’s little humour to be had, and you can feel the weight of obligation in each scene. If anything, the film is probably too reverential to Hugo. The voice-over narration that seeks to add a lyricism by using Hugo’s words frequently overlays the visual narrative, rendering one or the other redundant.

Flashbacks, though, are used well to illuminate backstories while also enabling Besnard to avoid lingering in a potentially claustrophobic setting.

Filmed in Cinemascope, as befits the epic nature of its material, the external shots from DP Laurent Dailland capture a harsh beauty. Interiors, lit by flickering candles that lend an authenticity to the film’s 1815 setting, are almost suffocatingly dim.

Yet the widescreen here, too, lends a certain grandeur and opens out the small space. These interior shots are conservatively framed and become a little repetitive. Many are clearly staged symbolically: Bienvenu and Valjean sit at opposite ends of a table with Baptistine in the middle.

Magloire hovers, offering waspish intolerance born of fear. It’s good versus evil with the possibility of redemption framed as a choice Valjean has to make.

The acting is very good and has to be because Besnard frequently employs close-ups. Gadebois gives us a taciturn, menacing Valjean, his inner turmoil suggested in small gestures and explosive anger.

The Bishop, who has experienced his own transformation, is a very saintly character, and Campan negotiates a fine line of believability with confidence.

Amid all the certainties of right and wrong, however, I was drawn to Carré’s performance. She conveys Baptistine’s unrelieved guilt and steadfastness with a fragile grace.

Besnard has a tight control over pace and tone, and if at times subtlety is forsaken, the result is always interesting.

Besnard has said that he sees the film as a western, and perhaps there’s just a hint of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Unlike that film’s ambiguous ending, however, Jean Valjean has an unequivocal redemptive narrative and ends with a grand, transparently biblical gesture.

Jean Valjean the Australian premiere season is on now in cinemas nationally.

Check the website for session times.

Website: https://www.palacefilms.com.au/jean-valjean

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