#beeble mis

[pilferingapples]

was just reminded that Valjean took 2 years to get out of prison and get Cosette in BBC  2019 

why 

[badlesmisimagines]

fear not, good citizens! For @pilferingapples and @secretmellowblog have figured out why Beeble Mis is Like That™ and it’s because it’s a loose retelling of Tangled/Rapunzel. (Valjean must keep Cosette because of her magic hair, which, if she cuts it, will reveal her true brunette self)

[betweentheheavesofstorm]

Last night I hateread a lot of the beeble scripts as they're now available online and while there were many, MANY bad parts, an honourable mention goes to this, from ep.4:

[binary-colour]

Enjolras: We don't need any romantic daydreamers or lovesick schoolboys on the barricade!

Grantaire:

[kcrabb88]

Every time I see a formal reviewer praise Dominic West’s Valjean and what the script did with him I lose a second off my life that was literally THE WORST PART OF THE ADAPTATION. One said he showed “humanity and self-doubt buried under monosyllabic machismo” well let me tell you something folks, machismo is not a word I tend to associate with JEAN VALJEAN but I guess it’s just So Human for him to manipulate and manhandle his daughter like give me A Break. That’s villain and antagonist behavior, not hero behavior. 

Like, this adaptation had some moments I liked, but Valjean was pretty much none of them, and That’s A Problem. I saw more humanity coming out of a broken Javert right before he jumped into the Seine than I saw from Dominic West pretty much ever, because he shouted all the time and had like, two facial expressions. David Oleyowo was clearly the better actor, even if the script didn’t super serve either of them. Did Valjean ever like, cry at all? I don’t remember him doing so, even with the Bishop, but boy did Javert cry before he jumped off that bridge before he got that glint in his eye and WOW. 

[pilferingapples]

Les Misérables

by Andrew Davies based on the novel by Victor Hugo

For anyone else curious about the BBC Les Mis shooting scripts, they’re all here; just scroll down the page a bit and you’ll see them!

[pilferingapples]

BBC ramblings 

One Weird Thing (among Many) about BBC’s Javert is that I have never  so often felt an Adaptation! Javert was about to do a Face Turn at multiple points  in the show

Fantine’s arrest and the barricades were the big ones where it felt weirdly plausible that he might just. Join the people he was sent to arrest . To protect them from that True Monster, Jean Valjean

I cannot imagine any other Javert even considering  it but with this one? feels like I’ve already read the AU , and that is Wild  

[pilferingapples]

Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme: BBC les mis

oooof I know this puts me at odds with a lot of my saltmates on this but: the Barricade Sequence was Good Actually? 

I don’t mean it was the Best Ever adaptation of the book’s barricade sequence (although,sorry, it is  the best version of that in an English-language non-musical adaptation as far as I can tell, and I have seen  A Few).  But it’s not really trying to be that--no adaptation with only three of the nine people who are supposed to anchor the scene can really go for the full Chanvrerie epic--it’s trying to be a different thing,and I think it does a pretty good job of what it sets out to do. 

Rambling!

At a guess from having watched it all way too many times, and based on Davies’ comments in interviews, I think the BBC approach was to try to make LM “realistic”. 

Now, I think this is a common approach in more recent adaptations, and I think it is, in general, a huge  mistake in adapting LM.  The novel’s not realistic, at all-- it’s Romantic, capital R , with visions and implied ghosts and explicit divine intervention and emotions that are meant to be clear from mental equivalent of the cheap seats in the back of the theater.  It’s got Love at First sight, fer cryin’ out loud!  I’ve seen several adaptations try to calm it down and make it realistic and it just does not work, the story fights realism on a fundamental, structural level. 

And the barricades are , very intentionally, the  Grand Mythic scene*, directly meant to be Epic, full of grand idealism and the sense of gods and giants and impossible feats.  It really really  doesn’t  work as Realism. 

And yet!! somehow! this is the one bit that imo really works, on its own terms! 

I think it may be because combat is one of the few places that modern-approach directors will actually accept a degree of heightened reality; the weirdness of combat and emergency situations is well known enough to make that a “realistic” approach.  So even though this adaptation was never going to give us Enjolras standing unmarked at the end of combat, or the full force of the Quel Horizon speech, or Prouvaire’s final prophetic cry of defiance or “your friends have just shot you” --we still get a setting-fitting version  of Five Less One More, and of OFPD, and some really sincere and emotionally raw moments between characters , and even Enjolras talking about love at the top of the barricade.   

The series even goes on the side of a bit of idealism itself, really -- Le Cabuc is cut out, the non-student fighters are given more agency and sense of self-organization than Hugo really hands them, and Hugo’s focus on the costs to surrounding residents of having a barricade spring up in a neighborhood are  pretty well minimized.  And then there’s the whole thing with Not!Feuilly Despiat which, geez, that is so  good and so idealistic and Mythic and on-theme for the story even on a novel level, that’s a whole extra post but geez--  Anyway,for some reason, this  is the point where the show decided to play gentle with the take on the characters and imo it works! 

Also: while we’ve only got three named Amis,  and Not!Feuilly Despiat , and all four of them get their own solid arcs here .  Courfeyrac goes from an uncertain, inexperienced fighter who seems to fear he’s only been playing with revolution to finding an absolutely hardcore level of commitment and an absolutely heroic final scene,  Grantaire gets his whole conversion arc, Enjolras visibly moves from immediate pragmatic focus  to a longer, wider view that’s more explicitly about love for people and faith in the ones who’ll come next-- it’s all there, it all works.  It’s not Hugo’s barricade, of course it’s not, but what it is works on its own terms. 

(and seriously I gotta write about the Despiat thing some other time)

 * I’m talking about Mythic here in that very specific Hugolian/preface to Cromwell sense; it’s not about other scenes not being Fantastic and Iconic but about some Hugo-specific takes on what being Mythic and Epic means