#lm2000

[breadvidence]

Remember when I used to write out adaptation reactions? Well, I sure did watch Les Misérables 2000, and—wow! What an impressively bad piece of television from all directions. I find it deeply compelling and will doubtless watch again. The folks of this year's Les Mis Letters on Discord were treated to my live react. Here, I'll simply outline the high (?) points:

The plotting is bad. This is a curious accomplishment, on account of it's based off of a novel that—despite its length and digressions—has a coherent, tidy, and driven sense of plot. LM2000 fails here, I think, for two reasons: 1) the chronology is wobbly, which creates disorientation for a viewer trying to track events 2) it freestyles subplots but doesn't make alterations to the overall story, resulting in the new material feeling disconnected and meaningless. I am totally fine with adaptations being creative, but when Robert in '52 is a more coherent and meaningful addition to the story, you might have gone wrong.

The acting is bad. So many of the cast members seem tired—I'm a fan of Malkovich, and I think he's interesting here, but he's peculiarly exhausted in his delivery. Steffen Wink (who plays Enjolras) stands out as being enthusiastic (bizarrely), and Asia Argento as Éponine sometimes aspires to be a Hermine Karagheuz in her delivery, but overall: they were definitely handing out downers instead of uppers on this set.

The dialogue is bad. We have all of us writers been journeymen once. Most of us, as journeymen, did not get to script professionally produced television. Good for whoever landed that job, I guess, despite the pain they caused me. And—y'know—despite my love for the fidelity of a '25 or '72, I do not demand an adaptation quote Les Misérables. Further, I understand that the subtitles I was provided with are, with all appreciation for the person who made them, a little wonky. Regardless of both these things: lord, do these characters say some dumb shit. If you haven't watched it yet, wait 'til you get to yellow is the color of happiness.

Did you want a Jean Valjean who is violent, brash, dim-witted, and a sexual predator? Me neither! Given rumors and accusations surrounding Gérard Depardieu's personal conduct, quite possibly he's chosen to play the role as a kind of self-insert. Most adaptations go the "I don't know, I guess this is a story about redemption?" route, but here's LM2000 boldly asking instead: what if criminals are inherently evil? (We could talk about the ways in which '98 and BBC 2018 share this fault—but I cannot emphasize the degree to which Valjean in LM2000 is, ultimately, a villain, which is not at all true for either of those.)

No, really: Jean Valjean is a villain.

Really.

So: a character who makes unambiguously morally bad choices like locking up and wanting to fuck his daughter I wouldn't always call a villain per se—that implies a role in the story as well as being a value judgment. However, even though the show tries to preserve the final moment of Marius' realization that Valjean is his savior and a good man, we the viewer know he is not. We have seen him be menacing, be violent, be controlling, be nasty, we know that Marius was correct to want him separated from Cosette. He's a Bluebeard, and the story of LM2000 knows he's a Bluebeard, it treats him as one, even as it gets incoherently tugged back to being Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and hits emotional beats it hasn't earned and doesn't really want to have.

No, really: Valjean wants to fuck Cosette.

Really.

At the convent, Cosette lets down her hair to indicate to Valjean she will visit him in the gardeners' hut that night. Valjean rhapsodizes to Fauchelevent—in a rare case of Depardieu's acting reflecting that there's a beating heart in his chest—about her beauty. The Mother Superior is shown to equate letting down one's hair to sexual availability. We then cut to Cosette and Valjean in bed together. Their dialogue refutes that they fucked because otherwise it would be very intuitive for the viewer to assume they did so. This viewer remains unconvinced they didn't. I was spoiled for the explicit incest (Valjean, as part of his confession to Marius, makes it clear that his interest is sexual), but I would've known at this moment where the relationship was headed.

You could read this Cosette as an interesting representation of how people who experience abuse can become attached to their abusers, particularly where isolation normalizes the relationship for them. Or not.

They could have given the show the tagline Javert Shows Up. Where's Javert? He's giving Fantine financial advice soon after she becomes a sex worker. He's at the Sergeant of Waterloo asking little Cosette if she's OK because he got lost on the way back to Montreuil. He's at the convent interrogating the Mother Superior. He's in the university as an undercover student telling the Amis not to rebel. I'm used to Javerts showing up where they ought not (at Valjean's release from Montreuil and to the Rue Plumet, mostly), but this version (with an air of exhaustion) is everywhere.

Malkovich and his leather coat are—perhaps unsurprisingly—my favorite part of this adaptation. I like his expressive forehead, his futility, his absurd and unsettling slow walk into the Seine (it's silly—then Malkovich shivers). In precisely one moment LM2000 manages to have an unusual flash of insight into the novel compared to other adaptations: Javert, during the Montreuil era, declines to explain to a colleague/superior (I fail to recall and I refuse to re-watch in this moment) what precisely he's on to—he's career-focused and embodying the artistic desire not to "brush the bloom off the rose", notes lost in television and fandom alike.

I am trying to wrangle the thematic implications of Javert coming from a family who hunt criminals—something about blood and history as destiny? Is LM2000 so invested in the idea of criminality as inherent that an upright police officer being the child of criminals is discordant? Is it simply fucking stupid? I don't know.

I would urge any viewer to anticipate and enjoy the Legless Wife, who is the symbol of Javert's moral awakening.

Really!

Yes, I should say: don't bother watching this, pals. Except: if you are real intense about Les Mis, watch lots of adaptations, and enjoy bad media if it gives you something to chew on, I won't actually say don't—in part, yes, because I like the idea of others suffering with me, but also because this version has been an enriching experience. It prompted bafflement. Confusion. Distress. Contemplation of why you would take a story about the flaws of society and make it about the flaws of a man, and how this is merely an amplification of how the story has been told again and again since its origination. More confusion. An ineffable calm effected by Malkovich's voice. Hilarity. Anxiety. So much! So bad! And yet—yes, I'll watch it again. Despite itself.

[breadvidence]

Another prompt, something you talked about over discord: a Les Mis 2000 Valvert fic. You are the only one who understands (?) this show so you are the only one capable of making it.

Things the fic could include: Blank expressionless stares. Confusing timelines. Nonsensical dialogue. Everyone just kinda Standing There.

The fic no one asked for, til now

Look on my work, ye Mellow, and despair! (For those who have not seen or heard the tea on LM2000, the creators interpreted Jean Valjean as an evil violent criminal, a sexual predator—the politics are bad, bad, bad. The experience of writing this was very strange. The profound ambiguity in Javert's brain over whether this is specifically the convict Valjean might seem strange given Valjean is already the mayor, but LM2000 does not respect timelines and so I will not either.)

⁂

Javert wonders, sometimes, if he has gone mad. The people of Montreuil-sur-Mer love their mayor. He hears as woman call the man a bear, and suffers a moment of excitement, uncomfortable twitch all through his body, almost energetic: thinks that she, too, can see how those hulking shoulders move slow and threatening through a crowd, the menace that is like a red light in eyes under heavy brows, the heavy hands that are paws which would rend apart—but no; she is startled, he is quiet, and she did not know he was present, and she is puzzled as she explains an entirely different metaphorical figure. Accused of some gothic cave in place of a bedroom, he invites women to view it, and when Javert hears of it he shudders with the question of their safety—but they laugh, they twitter, the mayor was merry over it, in his slow booming way, and it was like any man’s bedroom. 

Monsieur Madeleine goes his way, and Javert follows behind, slow and cautious, and tries to tell himself that a rich man’s eccentricities are not his concern. Such things have never been of interest to him. He is a hunter of thieves and poachers, unlicensed whores and counterfeiters, not—this, whatever this is. A threat, and if there’s something about the bulbous nose and broad shoulders that seem familiar, well, his unease is enough already. Then—there’s the whore’s wedding. Loose morals are not his business any more than a rich man’s sins, unless they are expressed in real crime. Still. It troubles him, Madeleine’s strange slanting humor over it. He could be convinced of the value of a woman exchanging a fille publique’s license for the marriage papers. Perhaps. Unless she is still to work, as a married woman? Well, whoever fathers the children, they’ll serve France, he supposes.

⁂

Despairing, he thinks: it ought not have come to this. Why must he roam as he does, and seem to find himself in every place? Madeleine’s hand is at Javert’s throat, but he’s silent. Javert wishes he would speak. 

It starts like this: the café was not one of his usual haunts, a complaint to follow up on, a conversation overheard, slang and filth from the galleys taken up by the mouths of men who had never been there but wished to consummate a crime common to the chained and the desperate and the womanless. He notes their names and makes his way back towards the station house to open a file, itching under the close brick of the ramparts to his left and the house walls to the right. He thinks wistfully of forests and the baying of the bloodhounds. He prefers poachers and brigands for prey, but he goes where his superiors send him. He must pass by the mayor’s house, so disreputably kept in the low town, and is displeased to see him emerge from the front door and come down to the fence. He touches his hat and hopes he may pass by, but Madeleine makes a sign for him to wait.

Javert halts, his chin lifted but his gaze respectfully held at the level of Madeleine’s breast. Waits. God, the man’s silences! He flicks a look up, meets inscrutable eyes, lets himself focus instead on one uneven ear. Is it the consequence of head trauma, he ponders, the kind that cracks and slides the skull about to reform ever so slightly yet grotesquely wrong?

“Inspector,” he says, low, “you look like you are off to a fine meal. You were smiling, slightly. I might want to follow you to see where in town can make Javert look eager.”

“I found a pair of buggers,” he says, offended at the accusation he would spend his wages prodigally on such pettiness as food, then frowns in tired distaste at Madeleine’s guffaw. “Forgive the unfortunate implication, monsieur. I was not smiling, but grimacing. I will file a preliminary report at the station so that myself and your other agents of the police can monitor them.”

“If that is a grimace, then all the world is a frown.” He’s smiling, now, as he leans his thick hands on the fence. “Buggery isn’t a crime.” 

“Indecency. Disturbing of the peace. Obscenity. These are crimes, monsieur. The buggery is merely a revolting mechanic of a perversion that disorders society. If the state’s law does not persecute based on God’s law, then it is because God will handle His business. We handle ours.”

Madeleine opens the gate, and an invitation can be derived from his gaze. Or an order. “If it is a revolt, it comes from what were the galleys.”

“These were not galériens. They were not, that is to say, bagnards, or forçats, or whatever name you want for them. Men who are not convicts will bugger each other.”

“You know so surely? Come in, inspector. You recognized them by the words they used, didn’t you? You are familiar with them. You were a guard. Guards see much, though they stop little.”

The hair prickles on the back of his neck, unease, the bristling of a hound. “I will not take your time with this.”

“You won’t take anything of mine. I’ll take yours—your time, that is. Come in.” 

It is a command. He proceeds with a slow step, his long hair falling over his cheeks. There is a blush there he cannot account for. Shame. There is no fire in the hearth, no ashes. He stares at the naked stone and murmurs, “You do not call dogs fucking in the street obscene. You merely beat them into the kennel, where they do not make an offensive sight for citizens. The bagne is a kennel, of sorts.” 

“Do you know, inspector, your voice has a kind of hypnotic quality. Not unpleasant.” Madeleine seizes him by the upper arm, fingers slipping over the leather of his coat before they clench tight, tight, the seam of the sleeve pressing into skin. “You might say more pleasant of things.” And turns him, roughly. “Look around you. I keep my home a kind of kennel, to remember humbleness.” 

“Dogs do not read so much, I think, or keep silver on the mantle. Forgive the argument, monsieur.” 

“You often argue. It is unpleasant. Did I not say that you ought to do elsewise?” His hand slides up to his shoulder, too harsh to be a caress, and pauses to dig a moment into the meat of his shoulder. “I think you ought to tell me what you know about buggery. Pleasantly. I think when we are done you will find it isn’t the state’s business, that it is not disordering. You are incapable of causing disorder—isn’t that what you think, inspector? I think you will not be able to hold yourself above others, unless you change your mind on the matter. Then those men you overheard will not be at risk of your report-writing, and they will not go to the bagne, where no-one should go. Though—who knows! Maybe I do them wrong.” He shows his teeth. “They might think the hard labor worth a hard fucking. One of the, at least, who’s looking to play woman. I don’t hazard the minds of the buggered.” He gives him a little shake. “You should explain to me.” 

“If I were to so fall as you suggest,” Javert says, in a last quietly-spoken attempt to save himself, “I would report on them and myself and you, and resign. I am upright, monsieur, in truth, and no hypocrite.” He makes eye contact, and feels hope, in the pause that follows. It hurts, a throbbing in his temples, to threaten a magistrate. He tries to frame it to himself as a warning, as he might warn a man about to step in shit with his fine boots. He feels the strength of the hand on him, and thinks of other strong men he has known. No, no. 

Madeleine’s fingers close around his throat, harsh, the grip exact: Javert will be able to speak, with discomfort. A practiced torture. “Do as I’ve said.”

Javert despairs.

[lm20001-blog]

With my mate @lewisalexwebster #withmymate #lm2000 #atschool

[lm20001-blog]

When you still feel really sick but you try your best to do as much revision as possible #christmas #christmasholiday #revision #enjoyinghiday #stillfeelreallysick #lm2000