JEAN VALJEAN
- Colin Fraser
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
FOUR STARS The first chapters of Les Misérables but there's no singing when a man imprisoned for kindness finds purpose when finally released from gaol.
PERIOD DRAMA FRANCE French #JEANVALJEAN Starring Grégory Gadebois, Bernard Campan
If LES MISÉRABLES is the grand, table-groaning banquet of French literature, then JEAN VALJEAN is the entree; thoughtfully plated and undeniably tasteful. Director Éric Besnard zeroes in on the opening stretch of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, stripping away revolutions, barricades, and Russell Crowe’s singing policeman in favour of something far more intimate: one very bad day (and night) in the life of a newly released ex-con.
Jean Valjean (Grégory Gadebois), freed after nineteen years of hard labour for the crime of feeding hungry children - and repeatedly trying to escape - emerges into a world that would frankly prefer he hadn’t bothered. Branded, shunned, and quietly seething, he trudges from door to door before landing, improbably, at the home of Bishop Bienvenu.
The plot is secondary to a single moral pivot. Welcomed with baffling kindness, Valjean repays it by stealing the Bishop’s silver. When caught, he is spared - not just legally, but spiritually - by an act of forgiveness so disarming it practically rewires the man on the spot. From there, Besnard lingers on the aftermath: the slow, uneasy birth of a conscience in someone who had every reason to abandon one.
This is, unmistakably, a film about morality; Hugo’s favourite sport. Justice here is rigid, bureaucratic, and faintly vindictive. French, shall we say. Meanwhile mercy is radical and destabilising. The film’s central question isn’t whether Valjean can change, but whether the world will let him (spoiler: it would rather not.) Besnard distils the novel’s larger argument that because grace refuses to play by society’s tidy rules, it is not only disruptive, it’s dangerous.
A troublesome idea in the early 1800s.
As Valjean, Gadebois is all brute presence and flickering vulnerability, and does the heavy lifting. It makes room for the heavenly glow of Bernard Campan’s Bishop whose stubborn decency is quiet and refined. Bridging the gap is his forthright maid and saintly sister. It's a team effort.
At just under 100 minutes, JEAN VALJEAN is no sweeping epic. This aggressively restrained, beautifully framed chamber piece finds divinity is in the detail, as it were. You may miss the sprawl, the politics and the sing-a-long, but as an origin story about one man, one choice and one very inconvenient act of kindness, this is a glorious, intelligent prelude.
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