A glimmer in the grimdarkness, 19th-century style

[sunnyskywalker]

I finally saw the new movie version of Les Miserables. I have many thoughts about it! For instance, at the beginning when they show Valjean dragging the gigantic flagpole all Jesus-like, my immediate thought was, "Nationalism: the downtrodden's cross to bear? The burden of the prison-industrial complex?" Surely someone has already written an essay

Comments

[jehnt]

I still haven't seen it - Les Miz is my favorite musical and I really like the book too, but made the critical error of wanting to see it with my fiance, whose response every time I asked was "Les Miserables? You do realize that movie is MISERABLE, right?"

Anyway, your post gets across exactly why I like it, even if it IS pretty full of misery.

[sunnyskywalker]

It's taken me over four months to see it, and I had to talk my parents into using their video-on-demand option while visiting (not having cable or dish myself, or being able quite yet to just go out and buy any DVD I want). I think it was worth it! It took some getting used to, because I'm used to Les Mis being this big operatic thing, and the movie took a more "small, intimate conversation in the middle of an operatic world" approach.

Thanks!

[blades_of_grass]

I have read the book a lot when I was a teen (in Russian translation), and it did not struck me as an exceptionally grim tale only because all of his novels that I had read were grim or grimmer, and most novel written around that period. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame? If you have a child that is basically the only light of your life, it will be stolen by a wandering tribe, and you'll search for it all your life, eventually damning a member of a stealing tribe to death - only to learn that she is, in fact, your daughter. The Man Who Laughed? I don't even want to go there, so hopeless it was. Or, a book by another author entirely, The Gadlfy by Voynich... Oh, the wonderful world of Romantics!

[sunnyskywalker]

HoND was pretty grim, yes! I think I've just mainly seen big, beautifully operatic adaptations of Les Mis before, which manage to make it seem less grim (and more "beautifully" tragic) than it actually is.