Here we are again on the streets of poverty-blighted 19th-century France, this time watching Vincent Lindon, Tahar Rahim, Camille Cottin and Noémie Merlant not-sing their way through an anodyne, politically incurious take on the classic novel.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Eskwad, San Sebastián Film Festival Nobody sings in the latest adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1462-page cinder-block classic, but the absence of rousing musical numbers does not mean that Fred Cavayé’s “Les Misérables” is going for gritty realism. The 179-minute film, enjoying a reported $37m budget and a host of Big French Stars trapped in starchily archetypal Big French Roles, spackles its resources across the screen in a manner that has come to stand in for “epic” (wide vistas of battlefields; gliding aerial angles on meticulous, digitally rendered 19th-century cityscapes; taverns and courtrooms teeming with costumed extras) but that actually just provides a lot of weightless distraction for how curiously unmoving it all is. Three gusty hours of lots to look at and nothing to see.
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