#its not really like knowing all of this would make valjean less sad

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 4.3.7

Another terrible, if amusing, chapter title translation. “À tristesse, tristesse et demie” or “To Sadness, Sadness and a half.” Trust Wraxall to lose all the nuance of that line...

“In short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.” Yeah, yeah, very fair. If a strange young man with “equivocal prudence and an awkward boldness” started hanging around really suspiciously without ever having spoken to them or introduced himself, I’d be on edge too.

“Ten years later, with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: ‘Pedantic and insupportable to the sight! you are quite right!’” Oh no, I’m laughing and crying. Cosette: this is my pedantic husband, he’s utterly insupportable and I love him very much.

I think Hugo tries to make some generalizations that honestly just come across as very Cosette/Marius specific tropes. “The young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any toil, the young man falls into all.” First of all, this is just what happens when a disaster alignment and a distinguished alignment are in a romance. Second of all, Cosette was raised by a great dad and is possessed of self-confidence and Marius has never had a decent parental figure in his life ever and thinks girls laugh at him on the street. “This booby is madly in love with Cosette, but Cosette does not even know of his existence!” Every Luxembourg trip is now a spec-ops mission for Jean Dadjean. He’s drawing his battle maps, planning his tactics, gathering intel. Oh, Valjean, what were you going to do, have her live with you forever? Become like Gillenormand and his daughter? “Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and harrowed by this gentleness.”

Cosette’s experiences are diverging from what Valjean is reasonably familiar with. I imagine this is a very common thing that any parent might experience with a teenaged child, they start becoming individuals outside your sphere of influence, you can no longer track their development of self. This feeling can only be exacerbated for Valjean and Cosette because they have a connection beyond blood, forged within some shared sense of hardship. And while Valjean feels he himself is past the point of recovery, Cosette is still growing and changing and needs exposure to experiences he doesn’t have and an understanding of a world he is a stranger to. “Jean Valjean had no experience of this misery, the only misery which is charming, and the only misery which he did not know.” Cosette needs friends, peers her age who feel the tribulations of adolescence with the same urgency she does. And Valjean needs someone who can tell him that this is all normal.

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 2.3.8 ‘Unpleasantness of putting up a pauper who might just be rich’

The Thenardiers really are society here in all it’s harshest aspects: the way they find ways to make the poor pay for being poor; the division between the children’s scorn for Cosette’s poverty and Cosette’s envy of their comforts; the way a rich man’s whims to have a child play are law and a poor man’s wish for the same is an absurd imposition. It’s all here in microcosm.

And once again, Valjean baffles society’s efforts at categorization.

I was struck last chapter by Cosette’s resilience and fearlessness in Valjean’s presence. This chapter, she’s cowering again, and we get a long description of the horror of her misery and fear. Once again it’s close to transforming her.

The expression in the eyes of this eight-year-old child was normally so forlorn and sometimes so tragic that it seemed, at certain moments, that she was in the process of turning into an idiot or a demon.

So far she’s staving off that transformation, as we saw in the woods, but it’s still encroaching. She needs to be out of here.

[Cut because this got long. Also, child abuse.]

I hadn’t previously caught how hard it is for Valjean to speak up on Cosette’s behalf. I’d pictured him in my memory as in control of this scene, and he’s actually only managing to bring himself to argue because of the harm about to be done to Cosette.

“Madame,” he said, smiling with an almost frightened look, “Bah! Let her play!”

Which makes perfect sense. This is society in microcosm, and it isn’t in him to outwardly rebel anymore--or even outwardly act like he deserves to be in society. Like Boulatruelle, his deference is suspicious.

Hugo doesn’t cast blame on the Thenardier girls. They’re just children, acting like children, and they’re lovely for it.

In the animal symbolism of the novel, Eponine’s play-acting sounds Significant.

“See, sister, this doll is more fun than the other one. It moves, it cries, it’s nice and warm. See, sister, let’s play with it. It will be my little girl. I’ll be a lady. I’ll come to see you and you’ll look at it. Little by little you’ll see its whiskers and you’ll get a shock. And then you’ll see its ears and then you’ll see its tail and you’ll get a shock. And you’ll say to me: ‘Oh, my God!’ And I’ll say to you: ‘Yes, Madame, that’s my little girl and she’s like that. Little girls are like that these days.’”

I never know exactly what to do with cats. They’re positive in this text, but what do they mean? I suppose they’re something that’s both harmless and not exactly tame like dogs are, capable of catching mice to fix God’s errors--a symbol of revolution--and capable, in a pinch, of transforming into lions. The people of Paris were cats in 1817 and presumably still are.

The child-that-is-secretly-a-cat also has, at least visually, some echoes of Little Red Riding Hood for me (”What big ears you have, Grandma!”) It’s a cat, not a wolf, but still. That story seems relevant to the story we’ve just come from, where our young werewolf child met a stranger in the woods and brought him home.

I just looked up whether Little Red Riding Hood would have been a cultural touchstone here, and of course it was--Perrault wrote it down in 1697.

Wikipedia also recorded this quote from Perrault about its moral:

From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

Little Red Riding Hood may not really be something the text has in mind right now, but that sure sounds relevant to what’s just happened. A littler girl went into the woods alone amid talk of wolves, met a stranger, and took him home. (It also applies well to Fantine, alas. But Valjean is a very different kind of gentled wolf.)

Hugo has some thoughts to share about women and I don’t like them at all. I’m skipping them, I don’t feel like fighting with Hugo right now.

Cosette “vaguely listening” and picking up “a few words here and there” as Mme Thenardier insults her and says her mother abandoned her is more heartbreaking than if she’d been listening intently. It gives a sense that either there’s nothing particularly new in these statements, or else Cosette doesn’t feel invested in them because they don’t contain the information that really matters to her, which is whether or not to expect imminent physical violence.

Or.... nope. I definitely read that wrong.

By “vaguely listening” Hugo meant “dissociating.”

Because the scene that follows is:

Meanwhile the drinkers, all three-quarters sozzled, were singing their dirty song again, jollier than ever. It was an off-colour story in very bad taste in which the Holy Virgin and the Infant Jesus both featured. Mother Thénardier had wandered off to join in the outburts of hilarity. Cosette, under the table, was watching the fire, which was reflected in her staring eyes; she had again begun to rock the sort of swaddled doll she had made, and while she rocked it, she sang in a low voice: “My mother is dead! My mother is dead! My mother is dead!”

The only versions of holy motherly love that have trickled down to her are corrupted into near unrecognizeability. Her eyes are full of flames, another hint of that demonic transformation under duress that she’s still skirting the edges of.

There are a couple of ways to read “my mother is dead.” I kind of suspect that Cosette, like last time transformation threatened, is grimly hanging on to her sense of herself and the dim bright side: her mother wasn’t a bad woman who abandoned her, the only reason she is isn’t here is because she’s dead. Cosette claimed to Valjean not to have a mother, but it’s clear she has complex feelings on the subject that she can’t articulate. These lines feel like such an act of faith, actually: It’s Cosette believing, against all evidence, that her mother’s love for her is real, that she would still come if she could.

And she follows that with an act of such courage and hope and defiance: she steals the doll and is enraptured by it for a quarter of an hour. She stays human. She isn’t beaten yet.

She must know she’s going to pay for this--but she would pay worse for giving up hope, too, or for giving in to the thing that’s trying to turn her demonic.

Fuck, she’s fighting so fucking hard. Valjean is beaten down by society’s expectations of him, but Cosette isn’t. Holy hell, I love her so much.

The retribution of society in the person of the Thenardiess rains down on her, of course. It says she sobs, which is one more way in which she isn’t Valjean in the bagne--she can still cry when she’s sad.

And Valjean is also near tears. We know he wept when he was being shackled fo the bagne the first time, and we know he hadn’t wept any time between then and the bishop’s mercy. I’m not sure we’ve seen him weep any time since.

There’s so MUCH in the fact that he’s watched all this happen. He was worse off than she was when he showed up here--beaten down, hopeless, almost like he was after leaving the bagne the first time.

We never hear directly what the bagne did to him the second time--but we can see it. And it’s a lot like what it did the first time.

And instead of being saved by the bishop, he’s being saved by Cosette. We watch him becoming a parent over the course of this chapter.

Cosette doesn’t touch the doll. Valjean puts the doll’s hand in hers.

And that thing about Cosette being irrepressible--as soon as someone is kind, she becomes a kid again, like she’s been waiting for it all along. Because, she probably has. Shoujo Cosette isn’t wrong about the way she seems to have been waiting all along for her mother to come for her.

“I’ll call her Catherine.” Oh, my heart. Unlike post-bagne Valjean, she’s so very ready to be saved.

Valjean after sitting still a long time rises up suddenly in a sentence structure that feels like his sudden decision making at the bishop’s. Once again, he looks down at sleeping people, this time on Cosette.

She left her shoe out, because she still believes the good fairy will come. And Valjean does come.

I didn’t expect this to feel like Valjean at the bishop’s, but it IS. The transformation Cosette is resisting is one he’s more or less suffered again.

She saves him the way the bishop did.

I love them.

[crossdressingdeath]

I think that the reason of why we don't quite undestand JC is bc we are not used to read villains like him. In general the hero makes it clear that they hate or have not sympathy for the villain and we have that, from the pov of wwx we know who are the bad guys and he doesn't like them, he really hates WC and with XY he said thag he had to die but with JC is little more subtle, mainly bc wwx still cares about him and yes he try to kill wwx but the protagonist make it sound like a minor issue, its easier to justify his actions like yes he was sad bc he lost his parents and wwx and his sister and he only kill bad people instead of understanding that he is not a nice person, talking about YA is not hard to find this character than is not evil just misunderstood and needs love and sometimes is the love interest of the protagonist and the end of the day he was a good guy I think that's what the fandom try to make JC but in this case he ends being bad guy just not the typical one I mean the stereotypical villain that wants to conquer the world but he wants to be the best and abuse his power and try to kill wwx. What I'm trying to said is that maybe everyone would know that JC is the bad guy if wwx said so or the cultivation world but wwx is just tired of JC and the cultivation world knows he is the sect leader that no one likes but not an threat as jgy.

But that’s not actually the case? I mean, I've just been talking about Outlast: Whistleblower and how Waylon explicitly feels pity towards and even empathizes with people who want to murder, rape, mutilate and/or eat him (in varying configurations) because he knows they’ve suffered, and that’s far from the only example out there. The thing people often fail to grasp is that there’s a difference between a villain you (and/or the protagonist) pity or even sympathize with and one you’re supposed to see as in the right and not really a villain at all. Hell, villains who started out (either in-story or some time prior to its beginning) as the hero’s friend and then turned to evil are incredibly common to the point of being a trope, and despite how YA generally seems to go that... doesn’t always end with them being redeemed or turning out to have never been evil at all. Stormlight Archives comes to mind, although I won’t go into detail Because Spoilers. It doesn’t mean the hero stops caring about their former friend or even necessarily that that former friend no longer cares about the hero, but that care doesn’t make the villain less... villainous.

I think it’s another one of those things with people assuming MDZS is YA because it’s gay fantasy written by a woman so of course it’s YA (no I will never be over how often that happens), because... yeah, ‘sympathetic “antagonists” who the hero genuinely likes will never turn out to be a real villain’ is way more of a thing in YA than it is in adult fiction. Same with the stereotypical villain; you’d be surprised by how often the main villain of a story is a personal threat to the protagonist(s), rather than a universal one. Back to Outlast, the danger is very much localized and you’re not trying to stop the antagonists you face; you’re just trying to get away from them. The fact that a lot of them die in the process is incidental and the player character probably wouldn’t have cared all that much (beyond having to deal with the chance of them showing up again) if they hadn’t. In Les Mis the world isn’t conquered when Les Amis fail, and wouldn’t have ended if Javert caught Valjean. Fantasy is more given to world-ending or world-conquering threats, but in media as a whole it’s not really the norm. Hell, in MDZS the only world-conquering threat is the Wens, who... if you think about it, as characters aren’t really in the novel. They’re flashback villains who only really show up in person once or twice. The biggest villain in MDZS is JGY, who’s already in command of the sects and... actually doing a very good job of it, he’s a good ruler and only a villain in the story because NHS dragged WWX into his revenge plot. This isn’t a story about stopping someone from taking over the world, so why would that be a secondary antagonist’s position? JC actually reads very much like your standard secondary antagonist; he will for sure kill our hero if he manages to capture him, and he does manage to get at WWX now and then, but overall he’s very much a manageable threat. To put it another way, he’s the active threat to JGY’s puppet master, like SS or XY. He’s a threat and he’s keeping the tension high... but WWX removing him from the board wouldn’t actually stop the plot, just change a few details of it.

Basically, JC... very much is a typical villain for the type of villain he is. It’s just that villains aren’t always big, overwhelming, world-ending threats. People seem to forget that someone only being a threat to the hero doesn’t make them not a villain.

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 2.3.4 “A Doll Enters The Scene”

The description of the candles lighting all the booths reminds me of Grantaire’s “who’s been unhooking the stars without my permission and placing them on the table in the guise of candles.” This is equally as poetic and ethereal, though far less drunk. There is no star in the sky, they have been removed and replaced with the candles lighting the booths. This means that Cosette will have no stars to light her way once she passes into the wood.

“In the first row in front, the merchant had placed, on a bed if white napkins, a huge doll nearly two feet tall in a dress of pink crepe with gold garlands on its head and enamel eyes.” This reminds me of the description of Fantine back in Paris, who wore “a dress of mauve challis” and whose “gold was on her head and the pearls were in her mouth.” This doll is like a toned-down, child’s simple imagination version of a distant memory of young Fantine. The mauve has turned pink and the gold is now garlands. The teeth maybe aren’t what Cosette would remember, especially if by the time Fantine gave Cosette to the Thenardiers, she wasn’t smiling much anymore. But she would maybe remember her mother’s eyes instead, and subconsciously notice that similarity as well.

And maybe this is Freudian as fuck but Cosette has no feminine, motherly figure in her life. Hugo has already established that Mme Thenardier is Not A Woman, and that any amount of motherliness goes only to her daughters. This gazing up at this beautiful feminine doll with real hair and an almost larger-than-life presence (at least for the fact that it’s 2 feet tall which is absurdly large for a doll) is an imagining of some sort of stable, admirable, feminine, motherly presence that she never gets.

I feel like Valjean giving Cosette the doll is kind of an attempt to give Cosette an icon of her mother, without having to explain himself or go much into it emotionally. He doesn’t think he himself can replace Fantine. I’m not sure if he actually believes a doll could either, but I wonder if this is the closest thing he can think of. This will be his second Benevolent Stranger moment towards Cosette (the first being carrying the water bucket in the next chapter) and I think a lot of Valjean’s Benevolent Stranger moments is him knowing he can’t solve a problem (or not understanding how to) but throwing money at it to try and help some way. Buying the doll also further establishes him as a Different Kind Of Adult in Cosette’s eyes. We don’t really get to see how she views other adults, but I can imagine that to her, every person that enters the inn is the same kind of person with power over her, who can ignore her entirely or kick her around (or make the Thenardiers kick her around) but will not ever help her or notice her or care about her. This doll establishes Valjean as something Different. And later on I think they both grow dependent on each other and on each other’s love so that Valjean no longer needs to be the Benevolent Stranger towards Cosette, and yet he will always have this weird sort of emotional block where he gives her things to try and help her rather than sitting down and talking to her and figuring out how they both feel and what they both want.

Cosette is so, so conscious of her class and her place in the world as she gazes up at this doll. Not that she isn’t constantly reminded of it with the Thenardier’s abuse and all that, but this whole amazement and wonder feels bigger than just being aware of her class status.

“Cosette was measuring with the sad and simple wisdom of childhood the abyss that separated her from that doll.” She’s not only comparing herself to who could access the doll, but the imagined existence and life of the doll itself. She thinks someone who is a queen would be able to own the doll. But that makes this doll is some sort of fairy queen as well, some sort of magical being. The doll isn’t just a doll here, the doll is some imaginary world of escape. This is the “Castle On A Cloud” moment; this is Cosette staring up at this strange magical being and imagining this queen (human and doll) living in a paradise that she knows she has no access to. It’s interesting that to her a doll living in paradise would also live close to god/the Eternal Father.

This is also a huge moment for her. It’s implied in the last few chapters that Cosette spends every moment of every day in a mode of hypervigilance, constantly aware of what the Thenardiers are doing and where they are, constantly aware of what has to get done, constantly aware of the tasks she dreads or the mood of the room. And here she has forgotten all of that, including how close to the door of the house this booth is, including the watchfulness of Mme Thenardier, including her errand. She is staring up at this doll and she’s transported entirely. It’s a moment of escapism that washes over her, only to be barged in on and broken by Mme Thenarder yelling at her again.

This is Cosette’s first real I Want moment, the first time we see her gaze and thoughts and desires stretch out beyond her immediate surroundings and the need for survival.

[pilferingapples]

Brick Club, 1.4 entire (retro)

Cosette's story often has such a fairy-tale feel, and it starts with this  section (what should I be calling these chunks of text? the X.X sections as a whole, not the X.X.X ones? Volumes?) .

And yet I'm not at all sure why I get that feeling quite so strongly, in terms of narrative technique.  The initial namelessness of the cast, with Two Mothers echoing the way people in fairy tales are Mothers and Millers and Eldest Daughters?  But if Fantine is presented as if she was s stranger to us again, it's not different than what happens with JVJ, and his story never feels this way.  The  Three Sisters made by Cosette, Eponine , and Azelma maybe? That's a very fairy-tale motif indeed.   Something about the way the inn itself is described..?

Augh, I absolutely cannot put my finger on it.   Still,  something about this passage feels as ominous and certain and doomed  as if the inn was a gingerbread cottage and Fantine was vowing to keep silent for seven years while making shirts out of nettles.

Notes on Various Things under the cut:

-  love that the inn sign is really badly made. I've seen several attempts at it in various adaptations and they're always a disaster and it's excellent, I want a collection.

-  the cart is covered with "the same ugly yellow mud sometimes used to decorate cathedrals".  The cart that is A Metaphor for outdated social institutions.  I see you, Hugo. 

- I will FIGHT Hugo about peasant/working class women's clothing in this era, this outfit would be super charming!  But it's definitely more about utility and practical wear than Fantine's old outfits.   There are roughly a billion dissertations to be written about the way that things working class people do and use are , through history, treated as inherently ugly/undesirable, regardless of how much art and beauty might actually have gone into it; I feel like the classism kinda speaks for itself on that.  And then,since Hugo's already drawn a huge Romantic Aesthetic defining line between the Useful and the Beautiful  in this book, I think  I can fairly just quote Gautier's explanation of the issue -- "Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature" -- and leave this for now.  I suspect it will come up again. 

- Fantine has been "marked by irony" --that is, scarred by her time with Tholomyes.  I do like the way  this new line on her face sounds almost like a dueling scar. Fantine's a fighter in her own way!

- ...Tholomyes is gonna make it to at least 1828, meaning he'll outlive everyone we love in this story except Cosette and Marius.    And he'll do it while being  "always a man of pleasure"--I feel like there's an implicit suggestion that Cosette has a lot of half-siblings in the world, all of them with a story as important as hers, if only people would take them seriously. 

- ...as a Somewhat Taller Than Average woman myself, I am rather delighted by Hugo's obvious terror of women who are Not Tiny.   ( And I realize I'm probably Reaching to think that Mme T might have been much happier and more well-adjusted if she weren't trying to cram her giant self into a tiny box of Ideal Femininity?  Maybe she'd have been much more ok if she'd  been able to go into showbiz and get famous as  a weightlifter or something. )

But I do think there's a real sort of sadness to her introductory chapters.  She had an ideal dream for her own life , and it wasn't even a particularly ambitious one--just a love story, really-- and it's fallen through as much as anyone else's hoped-for Ideal in the novel. She's still trying to hang onto it at this point, but we're already given a glimpse of the future  when she'll not only have given up on that ideal, but come to despise herself for it.  This is no way absolves her of her cruelty towards others, but I think she's a more complex villain (and she is  a villain) than she's sometimes treated as. 

- Fantine does try to lie about having been married, here! ...but she also comes right out and tells people she's making a financial Deal with exactly how much money she has, and how much she's able to give over, before it's all settled.  It's  painful how ill-prepared she is to deal with this kind of economic manipulation (and I think "prepared" is really relevant; she's had no one more naturally skilled or experienced to teach her how to handle these things, and business negotiations, which this is, are incredibly complicated) . 

Seeing how much money Mme T gets for Cosette's fine clothes makes me strongly suspect that Fantine was severely underpaid for pawning her own fancy things--unless, and I guess this is possible, her "putting all her finery" on Cosette  is meant to be literal, and Cosette's current clothes are directly made of Fantine's old fancy outfits. 

- Fantine tries to lie about having been married , and the neighbors *see* her crying as she leaves Cosette, and Cosette must have been well dressed and all for that first months or so...but still, everyone believes the Thenardiers when they start telling the town that Cosette is an abandoned, illegitimate child.  They believe it because Cosette looks the part, and Cosette looks the part because the Thenardiers force her into it.  In so many ways, Fantine is never in control of  the narrative about her child, and What People Say about them does indeed matter more than anything she does--no amount of effort, no show of love, can save her and Cosette when everyone else  has decided they're socially damned. 

...but on the less thematic and more practical side,how on earth are the Thenardiers learning about her marital status? Seriously, was this freely avaialable info?  This  issue is something that comes up several times in the novel and I really have no idea what access to people's family records was like? 

- we get our first negative association with a cat , hm 

- ...workers have "generous impulses", huh?  (also I am not at all sure if the corresponding Bourgeois Respectability is meant to be entirely a good thing, but I'm not sure it's NOT , like I would be with Some Writers? Agh) 

- The Thenardiers' animal souls are : 

French: écrevisses 

Hapgood: crab-like FMA: crabs Rose: crayfish  Donougher: lobsters

Google Translate agrees with Rose, but I wonder if this isn't one of those words that was colloquially used to mean a general category of creatures in its day --Things Like a Crayfish/lobster/crab-- and has come to mean something very specific now?

-  ..y'know, what really kills me about Cosette in this every time is how everyone , *everyone*  in this town really either believes she deserves her abuse, or thinks it's BETTER than she deserves.  This is not happening in secret, behind closed doors, in a private house; it's at the public inn and very blatant. Everyone knows she's out in the cold , first up every morning, starving and beaten, in a home where the other kids somehow have more than enough (because their parents steal it from Cosette, directly).  And not one person in this discount Omelas even thinks it's bad , much less intervenes. It's a point in the Thenardiers'  favor, socially.   This isn't just the gamins of Paris being brushed aside,this is a whole town actively citing horrible child abuse as the Moral and Good Option that elevates the people doing it.  

And in this, I suppose, Cosette shares a history with Valjean-- they're  both put through absolutely horrific abuse , which is not just societally ignored, or accepted with jaded apathy ,  but openly lauded as morally correct.   I hate Montfermeil so much-- but Montfermeil is not really different from Arras, or Digne, or any other place where people think that abuse of the "deserving" is a Good Thing. 

[not-a-christmas-tree]

i watched the dallas theater company les mis and here are my observations part TWO

i recently watched a modern adaptation of les mis from 2014! i took hella notes bc les mis being set in modern day has a LOT MORE than you would think! i just posted my act one notes, so here are the ones from act two. enjoy! :D

ACT TWO

(Building The Barricade)

oh javert,,,you and your red beret-scarf combo

everyone shakes hands the same way?? they all like. half bro hug. young people ig 🤷‍♀️ 

oh on my own is gonna hurt me huh

éponine has her hands up when she goes to take the letter to cosette that’s an interesting take

jvj looks so done lmao “really bruh just give me the letter i’ll give it to cosette it’s FINE”

omg first time i’ve ever seen éponine not take the money after the letter!! that actually makes so much sense bc she doesn’t take marius’ money when he asks her to find cosette’s house either. that,,,yes that’s good

the modern era begs the question... why didn’t marius just ask for cosette’s number?? i’d assume it’s just a thing that jvj doesn’t allow her to have a phone bc The Cops, but. maybe marius and cosette are the straight version of cottagecore lesbians they just write letters for ~The Aesthetic~

(On My Own)

i was right on my own was gonna hurt me

first time i’ve ever seen an éponine disguise where she actually passes as a boy lmao 

FINALLY A VERSION OF OMO WHERE ITS NOT JUST FORLORN SELF-CARESSING THANK YOU

surprisingly i have less notes here that’s fun i thought i’d have more

(Javert at the Barricades)

WOAHHHHH THEY DID NOT SKIMP ON BARRICADE SET PIECES THAT SHIT IS COOOOOL

oh the barricade scenes are already hitting too hard 

cops are in riot gear cops. are in. riot gear.

oh the javert spy thing that also hits funny because obviously

gavroche is armed with a bat i love you son

FULL VERSION OF LITTLE PEOPLE AT THE BARRICADE AYEEEEE

(A Little Fall Of Rain)

wait hold on why is marius not,,,singing to éponine on “why have you come back here?” he’s like. scolding someone,,, huh??

oh enj goes to help marius with ép!! and he calls over who i assume would be joly i STAN

MARIUS CRIES AFTER ÉP DIES KILL MEEEE

(The First Attack)

i like how jvj does the second confrontation here. he looks less angry and more like,,,compassionate and that MAKES SENSE bc yk. he’s telling javert he’s wrong but he’s not doing it out of spite he’s doing it bc this guy NEEDS to know what he does as a cop and realize that being a cop isn’t just enforcing rules, and it never was just that. 

i do love the exasperated “gO” from jvj that’s kinda great ngl

(Drink With Me)

i’m very sad that there won’t be any exr from these boys

v e r y sad here

i do see grantaire looking PRETTY sad though

bold of y’all to assume that the modern day amis would all be straight

okay i can tell that grantaire really is going hard on the Existential Singing like,,,sure he’s just standing there but like. damn bro

SO THERE A R E LADIES ON THE BARRICADE WHY TF ARENT THEY FIGHTING

BETTER SEE SOME CHANGE THERE

i just realized that the cockades are buttons that is the BEST

(Bring Him Home)

jvj actually looks kinda happy in BHH and tbh i kinda like it?? it’s only on the “he’s like the son i might have known” line but i like it

oh those vowels oh boy they TALL

(The Final Battle)

enjolras is for some reason, still angry...why...why bro....

the staging for gavroche’s death is INTERESTING bc he’s reaching up at the sniper on the tower. hm. i dont hate it

OH SOMEONE ON THE BARRICADE IS RECORDING I THINK!!! GOOD ADDITION!!

i can’t imagine how many blood packs they went through 

oh enjolras’s death okay so. he’s in a like. No Man’s Land almost, and the riot cops come in after him. it’s an interesting take because it almost mirrors the scene in the book, except obvs grantaire isn’t here. they also have an added scene after he dies where cops are checking out and using radios that is. that is EERIE.

jvj walks over to enjolras’s body 🥺

HE ALSO FUCKIN S C R E A M S WHEN HE SEES MARIUS ON THE GROUND GODDAMN MAN O U C H

thenardier steals combeferre’s glasses wow thanks for that added pain

thenardier and jvj have a mini fight oh that’s kinda cool hm

(Javert’s Soliliquy)

javert opens his soliloquy with some SPICY SADNESS OH B O Y he sounds broken already!! start strong!!

emotions go broken - anger - confusion? - mAJOR confusion - hopelessness 

javert can FLY! no legit he’s on ropes

(Turning)

turning is. turning is almost a funeral. 

OH THEYRE N U N S !

nuns are visiting the barricade 🥺 

OH DAMN “what’s the use of praying if there’s nobody who hears?” THAT CERTAINLY HAS WEIGHT NOW THAT THEY ARE N U N S

it has just occurred to me that people have been dead on the floor for like. a solid five minutes 

(Empty Chairs At Empty Tables)

“now my friends. are dead. and gone” he pauses like he’s realizing it just then oh OUCHIE

wait is marius,,,at the barricades? is he legit singing to his friends dead bodies? oh shit oh NO

OH N O OH NONONO THIS IS WORSE

THE BARRICADE BOYS RISE UP FROM THE FLOOR OH N O OUCH OUCH

they group up and salute him and wALK OFF NO OWWWW

*cosette and marius kiss* jvj: *COUGH COUGH*

marius and valjean’s lil conversation is interesting in the way valjean seems to ask marius “who am i?” rather than ask himself. he phrases it in a way that makes me think he’s like. quizzing marius lmao 

(The Wedding)

omg i think baby cosette and éponine are flower girls 🥺🥺

“go away thenardier” *madame mouths ‘dammit!’*

thenardier your boat shoes hurt me

madame: “get up! get up!” thenardier: “stop—STOP IT!” 

TWO GUYS ARE DANCING TOGETHER AND WAVE AT THENARDIER ON “this ones a queer, but what can you do”

yeah i think i found my new favorite thenardiers thank you dallas theater company

fantine sits on the bench when cosette comes by, cosette sits on bench next to her, and fantine tries to touch her but can’t 🥺

jvj just gave a hand-over-heart head nod to cosette but fantine gave it back i,,,ouch

ENJOLRAS AND GAVROCHE ARE WITH FANTINE AND ÉPONINE FOR JVJ’S DEATH

the chain gang is in the epilogue i repeat the cHAIN GANG IS IN THE EPILOGUE

the orchestra rests on the last “say do you hear the distant drums” and that was the coolest thing i’ve ever heard

that final harmony is MONEYYYY and i want to cry

OVERALL NOTES:

this javert has the most interesting interpretation because up until his FINAL SCENE he is the stone cold police officer, and he plays it SO WELL. like i have never been truly angry at a javert up until this guy, and whether that was because it was modern and resonates A LOT in 2020 or he just looks like a cop i want to punch, I DON’T KNOW but he plays it SO WELL and i love it so much!!

these thenardiers are the fucking BEST NGL they are the perfect mix of funny and cruel. madame t is also funny as HELL and i wish i had her talent lmao

i said it before but the police costumes in this show are. woosh. kudos to the costumer i took one look at those guys and was like “haha, no!.” vaguely related to that, i think this was the first time i nearly cried at Look Down like. the first song at the show, simply because of the convict getting the SHIT beat out of him on the floor. that hurt me and i hate that it is completely accurate to what happens in prisons today.

lovely ladies was,,,a LOT and tbh, i feel like it didn’t need to be. obviously it does show how horrible it is for sex workers, but that is why the music is there. the music and lyrics is there to tell what you don’t show visually. (though i do love the male prostitute lmao he took no shit)

i also said this before but the fact that there wasn’t bigger of a relationship between enjolras and grantaire kind of annoys me simply because they are revolutionaries in the present day. you can’t tell me that ALL OF THEM WERE STRAIGHT. with how many people i know now that identify under the queer and trans umbrella, and also how queer they are (to me) in the brick, the absence of any exr in a modern interpretation hurts a little.

in conclusion, this show was fucking FANTASTIC and even though i’m six years late, it still resonates hard given the time we live in today. i think i nearly screamed when i saw the cops in riot gear on the barricade because that is LITERALLY HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. this just reminds me how timeless the story of les mis is because you had to change LITERALLY NOTHING from the story to make it make sense in the modern age, and that is really the lesson you should learn from les mis; these things happen everywhere, and they need to be fixed. 

thank you for listening to my rambling, i am sure i forgot something because there was just so damn much but i hope you enjoyed otherwise! not-a christmas-tree out! :)

[peremadeleine]

Droopy Sleeves and Tiny Bonnets: Watering Down the Romantic Aesthetic in BBC’s Les Mis

I wasn’t exactly blown away by the costumes in the BBC production of Les Mis, and Cosette’s in particular, cute as Ellie Bamber is, were thoroughly “just okay.” But I didn’t put much more thought into it...

Well, not until Gentleman Jack--set in the exact same time period--blew BBC’s Les Mis out of the water with its costume design. Then more recently, when I started researching the fashion of the early 1830s, all the ways in which poor Cosette’s costumes fell short became glaringly obvious.

Disclaimer: I am not as much of a stickler for historical accuracy in period drama costumes as this little essay is going to make me out as being. I’m not a Frock Flicks kind of gal; I just want to be entertained and look at pretty clothes. So as far as I’m concerned, as long as the basic silhouettes are there and the costumes are nice to look at, I’m there. (I find the wildly inaccurate costumes of The Tudors a lot more visually appealing than the ones in Wolf Hall. And everyone knows Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was highly stylized, but those costumes are to die for and still embody the rococo aesthetic very well.)

That said, Cosette is a character who’s very invested in fashion, and the general look of the 1830s isn’t unknown to English productions, being the setting of Queen Victoria’s adolescence, Jane Eyre, Wives and Daughters, and many a Dickens adaptation among others.

So where did they go wrong?

Being honest, most of the Les Mis productions from the past two decades or so failed to put Cosette in high-fashion or even noteworthy costumes. Only the 2012 film for all the ways it failed her as a character hit it out of the park. Cosette gowns were damn near perfect--and they were actually pretty to boot! Unfortunately in the actual film you can’t even see the floral gown and you can barely see the blue one...thanks Tom Hooper.

The belts/buckles, the enormous sleeves, the delicate floral prints and embroidery, the lace collars...pat the costume designer on the back! (Her wedding dress was also on-point, but we’ll get to that.)

Claire Danes and Virginie Ledoyen had passable-and-sometimes-good costumes, too. Though Claire Danes’ were generally not very pretty, their overall silhouette was correct. Virginie Ledoyen gets a couple of knock-out, very period-appropriate gowns; the rest sort of fall into the nebulous “well, I guess you tried” category without being unattractive.

But the BBC production just...dropped the ball for reasons unknown.

Now, in the book Cosette overhears some ladies calling her “pretty but badly dressed.” She’s shocked, because she thinks she’s ugly but well-dressed. She then goes on a charming quest to become the best-dressed woman in Paris, and the BBC adaptation even has a scene where she goes to the seamstress. It’s really cute. Too bad that the dresses are...really not.

Here are some fashion plates from 1830-32.  Keep in mind that Cosette lives in Paris, of all places; she would be aware of what was and was not fashionable.

This is the height of Romantic fashion: giant (“gigot”) sleeves and bonnets, full skirts with hems at or just above the ankle, lace accents, silk stockings and slippers, elaborate hairdos. The 2012 costumes, again, capture this quite well. 

And even if the BBC designer had taken liberties and had fun while preserving the overall aesthetic--think what Sandy Powell did in Cinderella, set in roughly the same period--I wouldn’t be making this post. But there’s curiously little 1830s to be found in Cosette’s wardrobe at all.

I guess we should start with the BBC’s Good/Accurate Stuff. This coat Cosette wears is, apart from the deep fur-lined V-neck, almost a carbon copy of the extant coat on the right. And she has a bonnet!

Cosette’s best/most accurate dress is, naturally, the most difficult to see and has the least screentime of all her costumes:

From what I can tell, the sleeves, though delicate and sheer, are very full, as is the skirt, and the whole thing seems both pretty and en vogue...despite the questionable neckline. It’s also detailed--embroidery on the sleeves and with pleats (?) to create visual interest at the shoulders and on the bodice!

Here are a selection of other short-sleeved gowns from the period for comparison (both extant garments and costumes/reconstructions).

Tbh Ellie’s costume should be as stunning as the blue gown (far left) that an extra wore in Cinderella, but...maybe someday, in some Les Mis production, that gorgeous Sandy Powell creation will reappear. *sigh* (Virginie Ledoyen’s best Cosette gown is on the far right, btw.)

Anyway, that’s...that’s about it for the “Good” category.

Next up: her teal/turquoise dress(es). (She also wears a red one that looks exactly like this.)

Someone didn’t tell the costume designer that Cosette was supposed to be a fashionista, I guess. During my research, I did find a couple of dresses that resembled these two...but they would both be several years out of date by the time Cosette was going on her fashion crusade:

Even the yellow dotted dress has more style and “oomph” than what poor Cosette got stuck in--her sleeves look comparatively small, deflated, and underwhelming, all the more so when compared to actual 1830s gigot sleeves.

In the interest of being fair, some extant gowns from the right dates also look somewhat like these two.

But they all look, well...better. They all make me wish Cosette’s gown had bigger sleeves, a more-defined neckline, less wrinkly fabric...anything that would take it up a notch. (Also of note: as plain as some of these dresses look, they would not have been worn alone--accessories like wide belts, shawls, bonnets, etc., would have been part of the outfit when they were actually worn.)

And when it comes down to it, Cosette--who wants, after all, to be wearing the most fashionable gowns, like those in the fashion plates--should be wearing gowns more like...

The detailing, the fabric choices, the tailoring, and (sorry) the size and position of the sleeves makes all the difference here. A little more effort, even just padding for Cosette’s poor limp sleeves and a belt, would be enough to bump her looks from “kind of sad” to “something I believe this character would really wear.”

My personal favorite gown in the production was very pretty, flowing and delicate--and look: I’m willing to accept that Cosette wouldn’t always be wearing a fashion plate while chasing butterflies (something no film Cosette has, tragically, ever done...) That said, it still wasn’t very 1830s.

This purplish gown is the closest extant I could find to something like what Cosette wears here, but once you look at the details of both--fabric, neckline, whatever is happening around waist--all you get is “???” A lovely dress, but one that doesn’t make much sense.

So finally we come to what ought to be the showiest of all Cosette’s costumes: her wedding gown. 

This costume ought to be Stunning for a lot of reasons. The “Fauchelevents” have money! The Pontmercys have money, and they have society friends! Cosette is a fashionista, and she’s head-over-heels in sweet young love! And one an assume that Valjean wants to send off the light of his life, if send her off he must, in style--he’s heartbroken but also knows, from this moment, that he will never have to worry about her safety or well-being again.

With all that in mind, this is what Ellie’s Cosette wears...

Oh. Okay. Is it her freaking wedding day, or is she just going to a church picnic???

At least she IS wearing a bonnet in this scene, but it’s the same color as her hair (?!) and it’s tiny...just like her sad, deflated sleeves. The necklime and waistline both are at least accurate here, but like the sleeves, the skirt isn’t voluminous. Not a single thing about the dress makes a statement...unless it’s a shrug. The impression is, once again, “meh?”

At least a veil (which some women did wear on their wedding bonnets) would emphasize the “wedding day” vibe. How about, if they weren’t going to give it any volume, some detail on the gown...any detail...floral embroidery...a BELT...a contrasting color or fabric (lace, hello?!)...anything??? It’s just so plain and low-key. Just like everything Cosette wears in this miniseries.

Here are some period wedding gowns, two of which Cosette wears in other adaptations. They all have the wow factor this dress lacks.

Big sleeves! Lace! Belts! Veils! Lush fabric! Frills! Different colors/fabrics to create visual interest! Hairstyles that pop instead of blend together! These are the kind of gowns that say “I’m the bride and this is my day.” Not “I’m going to the church picnic.”

I want to reiterate that, after ALL that rambling...my big issues are that a) these dresses are not--by and large--attractive or interesting and b) that they fail to embody Cosette’s love of fashion. The fact that they’re so inaccurate for the time period is secondary. However, paying more attention to the fashions of 1830-32 would, I think, have helped make the costumes prettier and more suited to the character. How you dress a character is also a factor in how their character is perceived and can be a subtle means of character development. No chance of that here. (Post-marriage, Cosette wears such a blase dark blue coat that, sans fur trim, looks identical to her previous one. Yawn.) 

I’m just a fan, yet it still took me only three days of basic research to put this post together. Expecting a costume designer to put in at least a few days of light research is not a huge leap. I’m going to venture a guess and say that this designer did not bother to do that. And it shows.

It’s a shame, because Cosette gets a lot more screentime here--for the first time since the 2000 production--and she deserves so much more than shapeless gowns and barely-styled hair.

And also more than Andrew Davies...but that’s a rant for another time.

[roadtohell]

ok here are my final bbc les mis thoughts... i know i’m v late to the party but if anyone also has thoughts i’d like to hear them!

it’s probably not gonna sound like it, but i DID actually quite enjoy it as general entertainment. most of my complaints come from my interpretation of the source material as well as the 2012 film (which is impossible not to compare to)- if it was an original story i wouldn’t have nearly as many reservations.

things i really liked include:

absurdly cute baby marius, who i would die for

happy fantine :) for a bit

the handling of gillenormand and his relationship with marius, which i felt was v book-accurately sad and screwed up but also sweet when the time came

the thenardiers- the fact that they still retain a bit of the comedic edge only adds to the repulsiveness of their deeds imo.

things i really disliked include:

most of valjean’s character- he was generally angry and unlikeable. i think davies intended to highlight his struggle to do good, which isn’t an inherently bad goal, as book valjean totally has questionable moments followed by rackings of guilt (see: his attitude towards marius). the problem with the series portrayal is that what should be mostly internal conflict instead manifests itself in actively poor treatment of others throughout the whole story. sure, bbc valjean gives out money like it grows on trees. he also angrily fires fantine for lying while he himself lives a lie, stiffs gavroche on delivery money and tells him to buzz off, and makes cosette watch a chain gang to prove a point. it’s... an interesting angle, no doubt, but it misses the whole point of valjean’s story- the transformative power of kindness- by a mile.

a lot of adult cosette’s portrayal and especially her relationship with valjean. i get it, people often consider her tricky to write, boring, more of a symbol etc. etc. and feel the need to jazz her appearances up a bit. davies does not do a good job of this. her curiosity and idealism is framed as being frustratingly naive, as if to justify valjean’s overt possessiveness and control over her. he ends up physically restraining her over their “i want to see the world-” “well, the world sucks and i’m just protecting you” fight they spend most of their time having, which isn’t even resolved one way or another. the last episode does treat her better, thank god, but the cosette=love thing is less impactful when she’s literally pulled out the “i hate you” line. 😬

javert’s absurd level of valjean obsession- he honestly becomes a bit of a joke, eventually assuming valjean is the leader of the rebellion for no reason other than it involves crime. besides diminishing his competency, it’s actually easy to forget that he’s guided by his rigid sense of justice, not just his VPS (valjean positioning system). one day an adaptation will really take the time to explore how javert’s worldview applies beyond valjean, including to himself (i’ve always loved the brick scene where he asks mr madeleine to fire him), but it’s definitely not this one.

the sexualisation, jfc. frankly i think davies should be guillotined just for his interview statements on this topic. of all people, he decided to sexualise eponine and cosette. no i will not elaborate. there are also countless unnecessary implications, including between valjean and fantine, valjean and MARIUS, and a random convent girl onscreen for 0.2 seconds just to say she was looking forward to sex. but at least there was no santa sex scene, i guess?

thenardier straight up says he’s going into the slave trade and marius still gives him money... tf

the two boys gavroche looked after, starving in the street, is the final shot. because we all needed another dose of misery.

while i adore the musical, i can imagine why davies doesn’t enjoy it- it has no subtlety whatsoever with its messages about god, love, the LAW, revolution, death and everything else. add that to tom hooper’s dutch angles and extreme closeups and you have something that could easily be considered way over the top. davies presumably wanted to create a story that, as well as containing more plot than the musical, felt less preachy~ and more grounded in reality. in this, i think he succeeds- events are fairly book accurate, and a lot of the changes he does make, regardless of whether i like them, would certainly check out in the real world.

but hugo was one opinionated writer, and so treating les mis like a historical event comes at a cost. davies might despise the musical’s “doggerel lyrics”, but they are true to the novel’s message of compassion and love. in this series, the hope that shines through now and again is always quashed with little reflection; discussion on social justice, so clearly outlined in hugo’s introduction as the book’s purpose, is kept at arm’s length. therefore davies’ more cynical storytelling and characterisation, which also minimises hugo’s religious and political ideas, ultimately loses touch with the heart of les mis.

nobody who benefits this much from the musical’s success has the right to be such a dick about it, especially when the end product isn’t even better. to be clear, i think it’s a good series, and as an adaptation it could be a lot worse. but it’s hard to ignore questionable characterisation, sexualisation, and general steering away from the central ideas of its source material. i’d prefer to sit through russell crowe’s stars any day.

[gracie-p8-officialblog]

Spilling Tea On Phantom of the Opera 2004

DISCLAIMER: I just want to say from the start that it is not my intention to offendanyone, you're entitled to your opinions and I'm allowed to have mine...

Ok, so, I just watched this movie a few days ago on my laptop and it was pretty much my first time sitting through the movie. I watched a few clips of the movie on YouTube but... Then, I decided to watch the whole movie. And this was my reaction.

Don't get me wrong! There WERE parts I liked but... That was just half of the movie... But overall... Um... It was meh. Ahem. Down to business!

My opinion on Gerard Butler as the Phantom? Um, wow. And not in a good way. I feel like this was a case of a talented performer being grossly miscast as the Phantom. I think this Tumblr post best describes on what I thought of his singing.

"He's supposed to have the voice of an angel, but it sounds like he's been gargling vinegar" ~Quoted by @faded-florals

Don't get me wrong. His voice is quite good for an untrained singer but... The Phantom is one of the biggest musical theatre roles of all time! It's right up there with Jean Valjean. It's really not a role that could go a competent singer, someone who's never sang professionally before but could be good once they've been trained up a bit. The role demands a truly great singer... And he wasn't right for the part.

His voice felt too strainy, growly and rock-ish for the Phantom. I didn't like how Joel Schumacher bought into the whole "sexy Phantom" thing and cast a hunky heart-throb, who was nowhere near disfigured enough. It's meant to be a gothic thriller novel with a small romantic subplot, not a B-grade vampire romance movie!

As for Emmy Rossum as Miss Christine Daae... it's true, her voice is good. She should know though, should she wish to excel, she has MUCH still to learn (Heeeeehee. Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

Emmy's Christine had little-to-no character growth and personality but I don't think it reflects her as an actress, but reflects more on the director and casting director because of how young she was (but more on that later)

Not only that, her Christine was SIGNIFICANTLY dumbed down and oversexualized. I mean, the entire point of the story is that Christine grows strong enough to overcome the trauma of an abusive relationship and make sure that her abuser never hurts anyone ever again but still shows the Phantom compassion and sympathy. I mean, her story arc is her becoming strong-willed enough to overcome the Phantom's pull/spell/enchantment/hypnosis or whatever you percieve it as on her! And don't get me started on her costumes because of the SEVERE lack of modesty.

The chemistry was a little flat because she was underage and her two male love interests were both in their 30s (which totally isn't HER fault, of course, but the directors could easily have cast someone else older)

Her voice, too, strikes me as being much too young and undeveloped. She has a very pretty, sweet-sounding quality to her singing but she doesn't sound rich and operatic enough to be a convincing Christine. Rebecca Caine and Amy Manford do the best job of singing the way I think Christine ought to sound- a maturing opera voice! Though POTO is NOT an opera (you wouldn't believe how many people actually think it is...), it does revolve around opera, and Christine is an opera singer, not a pop star.

And now onto... Everyone's favourite vicomte!!!!!!

C'mon people, put your bottles down. It is a truth universally acknowledged (or at least in the wee Raoul Defense Squad Circle) that Raoul is one of the greatest and most underrated boyfriends to ever exist in musical theatre and it's almost impossible to hate him because of how relatable he is.

Ladies, puh-leeze. He's much more relatable than you admit and face it, we all have a little bit of Raoul in us. Failure to see things staring us in the face, saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, having a 'see it to believe it' attitude when we have little-to-no evidence on something... yeah, don't pretend you don't see a trend. Raoul is relatable whether we want him to be or not.

My thoughts on Patrick Wilson as Raoul, he was one of the few redeeming qualities of this not so great movie. Yeah, the swordfight and Tarzan leaps were a little too much but can you blame him?! And though I feel like that foppish wig made him look more like a magic elf prince than a vicomte, he couldn't control that!

His Raoul was so gentle and caring! Yeah, his acting was a bit stiff but at least his voice wasn't a chore to listen to, it has this warm, tender, comforting quality to it which suits Raoul. I really loved the way he sang "Don't throw away your life for my sake" and "I fought so hard to free you" in the Final Lair (😭😭😭) It feels like Raoul is genuinely apologising to Christine.

I know, I know... The Hadley Fraser fans are approaching with menacing expressions as we speak but let me clarify. I still think Hadley is amazing but... His Raoul kinda felt a little too shouty for me and his Raoul was closer to the LND-canon than POTO-canon (not his fault though).

Miranda Richardson (aka. Rita Skeeter) as Madame Giry is kind of weird. I mean, I know Madame Giry's supposed to be a little Strange and Mysterious. But this Mme. wasn't really Strange or Mysterious at all, or even slightly Spooky at all. She was just kind of an oddball. Popping up in random places to give warnings about the Phantom and looking at people as if she were questioning their life choices or something. As for her daughter... well, Jennifer Ellison's Meg was so-so. She's got a sweet-sounding voice and that added scene where she looked for Christine in the lair was a nice touch... But... Her Meg was kinda forgettable and uninteresting. Meg is supposed to prance around shrieking that the Phantom of the Opera is here, not whisper it in a blase manner that you half expect to be followed up with, "by the way, what's for lunch?" Not to mention, she rivaled Christine as far as low-necked costumes went.

Minnie Driver as Carlotta was spot on! Yes, I know she didn't sing the score but her acting was alright. She was very over-the-top and self-centered, which is great for Carlotta, but I felt her portrayal was a little too childish to be accurate. Carlotta is a successful middle-aged diva who's willing to scream and storm when she doesn't get her way, but she isn't a two-year-old pouting and throwing tantrums. (Yes, there's a difference.)

Ciaran Hinds and Simon Callow played Firmin and Andre, respectively. Their managers kinda felt like twits and nothing more. Also, Firmin's masquerade costume was ridiculous. The stupid kind, not the funny kind. ...Well, okay, it was a little funny.

I'm not going to touch on every song here, but I will say that "Hannibal" was beyond awful (if you thought the costumes in the stage version were a bit risque, you should see the movie ones- no, actually you shouldn't) and that "Think of Me," while very nice, was not particularly memorable. Christine's dress, however (despite its less-than-ideal neckline) was GORGEOUS, even though it looks completely out of place in a musical that supposedly takes place in ancient Alexandria.

"Little Lotte" kinda lost its charm by being spoken instead of sung. And Gerard Butler's voice in "The Mirror" was too rough and raspy for my ears and made me cringe in sympathetic shame. The title song was like a cheesy, campy B-grade horror movie tbh, trying way too hard to be spooky and chilling ("ooh, look, Phantom's Lair! It's DARK and SCARY down here!") and succeeding only in being cringeworthy. Not that I've actually ever seen a bad horror movie- or any horror movie at all, for that matter. Unless you count this one.

Christine's costume, too, annoyed me no end. She was basically wearing a corset and drawers under the dressing gown. *facepalm* The dressing gown is supposed to go OVER your COSTUME to keep it CLEAN, peeps. It's not a BATHROBE. And the amount of eye makeup she had on would terrify a raccoon. Yikes.

Though I liked the random horse because of its nod to the Leroux novel.

"Music of the Night" was so blah-slash-touchy-feely that it made me summarily uncomfortable.

I'd like to be able to say something nice about "I remember/Stranger than you dreamt it" but I have none. One thing that bugged me to no end was how Christine is no longer wearing stockings, like dude, that gives some GROSS implications. Anyways, let's skip to Il Muto!

Oh, but first I should say that "Notes" was rather a flop and that "Prima Donna" is unmemorable and indeed should probably be fast-forwarded as there's a rather unsavory bit involving a crew member showing the audience what he thinks of Carlotta's behaviour.

"Il Muto," I must say, was pretty doggone funny. Carlotta's "Your part is silent. Leetle toad," cracked me up into a bunch of giggling little pieces, and the little vignette of the Phantom tinkering with Carlotta's throat spray made her croaking later on a lot more believable.

Now for "All I Ask Of You", SQUEEEEEE!!!!!!!!! I honestly can't understand how anyone could listen to this song and still maintain that Christine and Raoul don't belong together. He represents everything she needs- stability, protection, a guiding hand and affirmed affection. She represents everything he needs, in turn- someone to show affection to and his childhood friend.

One thing I definitely think could have been left out was the scene in which Erik kills Buquet- we totally did not need to see him being chased, terrified, through the rafters and finally strangled. Gross.

And the Phantom and his rose crouching behind that statue... I think this was supposed to be sad, but there was too much snot mixed with tears for it to be sad. It was, again, gross. So was Gerard Butler's pathetic attempt at the "all that the Phantom asked of you" line. And the lack of a chandelier crash in that scene made the song anticlimactic.

And "Masquerade" was so-so but... The Phantom's entrance is anticlimactic somehow, and his Red Death costume (if indeed it's supposed to even BE the Red Death) is unimpressive. I don't like how Raoul just runs off to desert Christine as soon as things start looking ugly (yes, I realize he was going to get his sword, but still... something could have happened to her while he was gone. Duh, did this guy learn anything from "Little Lotte/The Mirror"? Just sayin)

As for Madame Giry's flashback immediately following, I like how it gives us some of the Phantom's backstory, but it seems really abrupt. You don't even realize until she's done that she was talking to Raoul the whole time- it sounds like she's just randomly reminiscing about Stuff, and if you didn't know the story you might be sitting there thinking, "who is this strange woman again?"

Also, Christine leaving wherever-it-is at, like, five in the morning to go to who-knows-where, completely oblivious to the fact that the Phantom is driving her. Whaaaaaaaaa? How'd he know she was planning to go for a graveyard stroll? Was he watching her through the mirror again? THAT'S JUST CREEPY.

"Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" was rather mediocre and dulled down the fact that it is a Christine Empowerment™ song. Why, exactly, does Christine's father have the biggest monument in the cemetery? If he were a rich and famous violinist as his crypt seems to suggest, why on earth was his daughter struggling along as a chorus girl taking free music lessons?

The swordfight... Well... I had mixed feelings about it. Sword fights are all well and good, but... The swordfight takes away the element of mysterious danger to the Phantom. Okay, fine, Christine getting Raoul to spare the Phantom's life is a nice touch, I guess, but did it strike no one else that his "now let it be war upon you BOTH" makes absolutely NO sense after that? If she just saved his life, why would he suddenly be all, "thanks, but no thanks, I'M GOING TO MURDER YOUUUUUUUUUU"?

And "Twisted Every Way" was after "Wishing" which made ZERO sense. Plus, I didn't like how they cut most of it because in the musical, it gave Christine a spine!

"Point of No Return"? Hooooooo boy....... There are so many things wrong with this number. Let's just a list a few.

*HOW did no one recognise the Phantom through his "disguise"?! At least in the stage play, it made more sense because of how he was wearing a cloak that obscured most of his body.

*Christine's sleeves falling down over and over again were REALLY annoying.

*It was just too touchy-feely for my taste.

*The fact that Emmy Rossum was a teenager during filming made this scene gross because of the way they oversexualized Christine in this scene.

*Gerard Butler's voice in that scene made me cringe and shake my head in sympathetic shame.

*In the stage play, Christine ran from him, showing her own agenda and resistance to his pull! While in the movie, she didn't resist him!

*Now for the one that took the cake... The disfigurement! Or it would be a disfigurement if it actually made him look, y'know, deformed. Instead, as several people have put it, he looks like he got a bad sunburn or something. It's really rather pathetic. It makes him look more like a drama queen than he already is! Yeah.... I really don't like this movie.

On to... Final Lair!!!!!!!! It was a flop. From Raoul's whining and flailing around and his stringy hair flopping about (shallow complaint, I know, but it's so ugly) to Christine's sappy melodramatic "don't make me choooooooose" faces to the Phantom's prancing around with his ropes and maniacal laughter that somehow wasn't really scary at all... yeah, it was a flop. A major, major flop. And though The Kiss wasn't all that bad, all I could think of was, "She's SIXTEEN! SIX! TEEN! THIS IS CREEPY, DISTURBING AND GROSS!"

Which is why it's so difficult for me to admit that, um, I... cried at the end.

I COULDN'T HELP IT GUYS HE WAS ALL ALONE THERE IN HIS LAKE WITH HIS MONKEY AND HIS SMASHED MIRRORS AND HE WAS CRYING AND IT WAS SAD.

And then that rose on the gravestone? That single red rose? And the look on Old Raoul's face (still Patrick Wilson, by the way, under all that makeup) when he saw it and realized he wasn't the only one visiting Christine's grave? Yup, I lost it again there, too. And I really didn't want to. Because I tend to cry over movies I love, y'know? And I didn't love this movie. At all

Yet I still cried at the end. I'm not really sure why. I think perhaps it had something to do with the way the story still "got" me, deep down inside, despite the lousy casting and less-than-perfect singing and ridiculously unnecessary elements that totally didn't need to be there. It's still a tragically beautiful romance, and even a bad film can't kill that.

In conclusion, I think Mary Poppins can best express what I thought of POTO 2004.

In conclusion, I rate it a 2.7/5

[sneez]

BBC LES MIS EP 6 THOUGHTS

my god.

i burnt myself out with frustration last week so all i can say this time is. i am exhausted but not surprised

this episode started out pretty strong, i really enjoyed all the barricade stuff early on, and the cinematography was quite nice too

cosette wearing a red dress felt weird somehow. very nitpicky but still

i LOVED the ‘let all the women and fathers of children go from here’ scene, that hit me really hard for some reason especially with them all hugging and condemning themselves to death

what i didnt like was enjolras going ‘I COMMAND YOU’ & marius going ‘i entreat you :)’ like marius is suddenly The Voice Of Reason i thought that was sort of weird. also the fact that enjolras gives a really depressing speech about death and futility felt pretty out of character -- i dont have any particular interest in enjolras but it didnt have the same emotional power as the musical, where he continues to believe their sacrifice is worth something until the very end rather than going ‘guess ill die’

also. marius calls him enjorlas. twice. he definitely calls him enjorlas

have i mentioned courfeyrac yet? i really like courfeyrac. grantaire is good too, he feels much more like his book counterpart than most grantaires honestly. also enjolras being genuinely angry with him a lot of the time rather than just vaguely resigned

CANNONS!

i liked the CANNONS! a lot but thats just because im a Cannon Fan and any scene with cannons would make me excited. the way it was filmed was very good at portraying the properly devastating impact of one cannonball, which is not often depicted for some reason. i mean, there’s stories of single cannonballs killing up to seven men during naval battles thanks to the way they ricochet -- these cannonballs felt like they had real power to them, and the bit where one went right past the camera made me jump which i appreciated

also the bayonets were really good too. im just talking about weapons now but bayonets always seem really horrible to me -- something about their shape and the way they’re used feels very visceral and unpleasant, much more so than a sword. i dont think the enthusiastic ‘ssssssssssshing’ sounds every time they did anything were necessary though

cosette sprinting out into the street and pinballing off the national guard was weird

valjean just? walks into the barricade? from the back? is nobody guarding the back entrance? why dont the national guard walk in too? why does valjean not wear a national guard uniform? did nobody THINK THIS THROUGH

also for some reason they seemed to decide that valjean carrying a big mattress was much more noble than him warning them of snipers. i dont know why they made that decision (good bayonets again though)

gavroche’s death was going SO WELL until the very end.....his little skipping dance was nice, i liked his song, and his ‘nice shot’ line was good too. but then for some reason marius has to run out and bring him back??? which in my opinion strips the scene of a big chunk of its emotional power. the image of tiny little gavroche dying alone in no man’s land is so poignant, and by having marius carry him back over the barricade before he dies so he can give his Final Words just......makes it so much less powerful. i dont know why they changed it except to make marius seem more heroic, which they didnt need to do because he already had his GET BACK OR ILL BLOW THE BARRICADE thing

(valjean voice) ‘o bugger thats the kid i told to scram ten minutes ago. uuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ill just pick him up and pretend im very sad oh dear whoops probably shouldnt have yelled at this Deceased Child’

the scene where valjean frees javert was just................augh. aaaaaaaaaaauuuuughhhhhhhhhh

for one thing, javert seems properly horrified and alarmed to see valjean at the barricade. rather than spotting him and turning his head away with an Unsurprised And Grimly Resigned Expression as he does in the book, he sort of scrambles to try to escape and looks almost scared of valjean. which is JUSTIFIED given that valjean advances on him loading his gun like a serial killer!!!!!!!!! and then valjean YELLS AT HIM and tells him to shut his mouth and then threatens him with the gun when javert is confused saying ‘do you want to die’ WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY W

just try to imagine bbc valjean saying ‘there’s nothing that i blame you for, you’ve done your duty, nothing more’. it doesnt work. this man is not valjean

he’s just so angry, i cant work out why he frees javert at all because it’s clearly not out of compassion; he looks like he actually wants to kill him but is being forced not to, which is just.....so wrong. also the fact that javert tries to get away from the knife when valjean goes to ‘kill’ him is indicative of how badly they’ve misunderstood javert. obviously a person’s instinct would be to evade a weapon, but javert is completely willing to die at this point. he shows absolutely no fear; he even welcomes it, saying ‘kill me rather’ when valjean tells him to go. valjean also seems to fire the pistol to intimidate javert into leaving rather than maintaining the pretence to the students that he executed him, which i dont understand. god i cant stand this valjean. i miss hugh jackman and he wasnt perfect but he was eons ahead of this

enjolras’ death was pretty good i guess, i suppose the les amis folks on here will all be happy that he held hands with grantaire, nice

i doubt this was intended but this adaptation has me feeling very sorry for the national guard. every time there was an action scene i worried about the national guard which i.............dont think i was supposed to

why does valjean have so many weird hallucinatory flashbacks to people saying he’s a monster and a criminal. he has done this multiple times. also PETIT GERVAIS AGAIN WOO i cant get over the fact that petit gervais has been mentioned at least 5 times more than the bishop, who has not been referenced since, like, the first episode

does thenardier recognise valjean immediately in the sewers in the book? i might be remembering it wrong but i thought he didnt, at least at first. i mean he is covered in sewage so it would be pretty hard but i cant remember

javert telling his second-in-command that valjean let him go at the barricades just feels. agh. wrong

theres something so poignant about javert’s isolation in the book. he does pretty much everything alone; he has nobody to turn to, nobody to talk to, and that is a big part of what makes him such a tragic character. i know the bbc need to explain everything to the audience in case they dont understand from visuals alone (ugh) but the fact that he just. tells whatshisname everything that happened robs him of that agonising burden of self-doubt. i know his second is not a friend by any means, but javert’s story, and particularly this part of his story, is so powerful partly because he travels it so entirely alone. it just doesnt have the same gravitas if javert just lists everything that happened, including an event that shook him to his core more than anything else in his life, to one of his officers. ‘are you mocking me’ was also..........ehh. i dont like that he took a squadron of officers to find valjean either; it just feels so much..........worse. theres no sense of a climactic confrontation, of these two characters coming together for the final time, and parting in such an anodyne manner, when theres a bunch of peelers hanging around as javert faces The Escaped Convict. ALSO the fact that they all know about valjean now, rather than valjean’s past and his involvement in the barricade being kept pretty much secret, means that they can??? look for him now???? even after javert is dead???? javert’s death means proper finality for valjean in the book, because he is the one person who knows valjean’s history. there’s also a tragedy to it, because he has to die to give valjean that finality. but i guess that isnt the case here because now the whole paris police force knows valjean is still at large!!! great!!!!!

before i forget i should say that david oyelowo’s acting was absolutely smashing in this episode and i love him. i wish the script had actually given him the real character to work with rather than this Discount Javert Stereotype but he did such an outstanding job

Awkward Carriage Ride!!!!! wahoo!!!!! it wasnt very awkward but at least it was there!!!!!

i didnt like ‘are you insane?’ ‘i dont think so. are you?’ it felt very very forced and also javert is supposed to be WAY too shell-shocked and in a state of Currently Considering Suicide to be talking that easily

tfw ur monsieur gillenormand’s servant and u have to put ur wig on in the middle of the night to carry monsieur’s half-dead sewage-covered grandson up the stairs :///

ok. we have got to talk about javert’s suicide. good grief

first of all, im glad he wrote his letter to the prefect, that was nice. HOWEVER. the whole part in the station where he sat and cried and described his emotional torment to That One Policeman again was......agh. he wouldnt do that. he would NEVER do that.

my big problem with javert here is that bbc javert does not kill himself because his worldview is questioned. he SAYS his worldview is questioned, but it is not indicated in any other way that The Valjean Revelation causes him to question anything more than his feelings towards valjean. this javert seems to kill himself because he was wrong about this one convict, which just.....misses the point. javert kills himself because valjean is an example of all the people he has wronged throughout his life, all the lives he has ruined through his own ignorance. the fact that it is valjean in particular who demonstrates this is not the most significant factor. bbc javert apparently realises that he has judged this one man wrongly his whole life, and decides to die because of that (which i guess makes more sense in this version as he was so obsessive about catching him); whereas book javert sees in valjean evidence that the world is not black and white, and those who have broken the law can still be good people. it’s a completely different situation, and it strips javert’s suicide of its intent. bbc javert is not a man who suddenly realises he has been wrong about everything his whole life; he is a man who suddenly realises he has been wrong about this one man since the man broke parole. which sounds way less powerful. because it is.

why does javert do so much crying.....i dont understand......javert does not cry........

i had high hopes for the actual suicide scene when javert stepped very resolutely up onto the parapet, but then he just. sits down and cries for a bit. and then he takes this FLYING LEAP off the bridge into completely calm water and it’s just. agh. i hate it

the way it’s written in the book is SO cinematic and EASIER TO FILM i just cannot understand why they felt the need to change it, he’s supposed to be completely calm on the outside and put his hat very carefully on the parapet and then stand for a moment and then tip in and disappear into the water without fanfare or any indication of emotion. it’s SUCH A GOOD SCENE he is RESIGNING FROM LIFE with the same dignity he had when he attempted to resign in montreuil-sur-mer, but this version makes it seem like he’s steeling himself to do it, forcing himself almost to jump off before he changes his mind, whereas book javert Could Not change his mind. i just dont understand how the script so consistently missed the point of his character. i dont understand it

why does valjean run up and down the street shouting for javert? hes trying to arrest you mate if hes gone you probably dont want him to come back, stop yelling

i have to say i think gillenormand was my favourite character in this whole adaptation. i loved all his scenes and i really really loved his character, he was terrific

i didnt like the scene where valjean tells marius about all his Past Misdeeds. it was fine until valjean went ‘what if i told you i was in half a mind to kill you at the barricade’ valjean are you SERIOUS i dont blame marius for chucking you out the house and refusing to let you see your daughter now!!!! for god’s sake!!!!!! This Man Is Not Jean Valjean!!!!!!!

ok the wedding scene was cute. it was very cute

valjean coughing as he walks around his house to essentially say goodbye to it seems to imply he has some sort of illness? i will touch on this more in a bit

kind of miffed they left out thenardier dressing up as a fancy gentleman to try to get more money out of marius and cosette. instead they just had him immediately announce his identity i guess

(thenardier voice) ‘have i reminded you im evil in the last 3 seconds’

does valjean die in digne in the book? i cant remember. i know he dies in the convent in the musical but ive forgotten where it was in the book so i dont know if this adaptation is accurate or not

i really cant tell if valjean is supposed to be dying of illness rather than his ‘wasting away’ from the book. that does seem to be the implication, given his hair changing colour and the fact that he is still walking around rather than lying in his bed staring at the wall for half a year. if they have changed it that way, i dont like it. valjean is supposed to survive all his hardships and reach the point where he could have a very happy life, but instead decides to remove himself from happiness by not telling marius he saved his life and wasting away alone because he doesnt think he’s worthy of his daughter’s love. bbc valjean seems to be ill already, which does not have anywhere near the same amount of emotional poignancy. perhaps i’m reading it wrong, in which case i retract my criticism, but i cant tell for sure.

i felt absolutely nothing during valjean’s death scene, which is very telling of how much i disliked this valjean because i always cry copious amounts during his death in the musical and the book

the final shot. oh boy.

i thought it might end on the candlesticks, which, i thought at the time, would be a pretty clumsy final shot but still effective. i mean, the candlesticks are one of the most iconic images from les mis, and they do symbolise a great deal of the book’s themes. BUT THEN! we cut back to paris! and gavroche’s little brothers (although i dont think they’re his brothers in this version) starving on the streets! and everyone ignoring them as they beg on the ground! HHHHHHHH

i think that decision, to have the very last shot of the tv show be an image of suffering and torment, exemplifies the biggest problem this adaptation had. victor hugo’s les miserables had a message that, despite the injustices of the world, despite all the pain and tragedy of life, love and kindness make it worth living. there’s a reason the last line of the musical (before the final song) is ‘to love another person is to see the face of god’. the fact that the bbc chose to show for its final image the worst of society, to indicate that suffering prevails despite all the futile efforts of mankind, demonstrates to me that they did not understand the message of les mis at all. there is no love in this adaptation, and that, in my opinion, is what makes it fail.

i suppose now for the final time i must make my disclaimer: i have absolutely nothing against the people involved in the making of this show. in fact i absolutely applaud all the actors, costume designers, set designers, everyone, because they did an absolutely magnificent job! it seems strange to say it given the amount ive complained about it but i really have enjoyed this adaptation. ive loved watching it every week and it’s been great fun picking it apart! despite my criticisms, i am glad it exists and i have no doubt i will watch it again in the future. thank you so much to anyone who has been reading my analyses, i love you very much!

[sophiethetheatregirl]

Les Miserables (2018) Review/Thoughts (SPOILERS)

Okay, let’s get this straight: I don’t hate this series. It’s just that a lot of things really annoy me. First, let’s just quickly talk about the positives before unpacking...everything else. 

It was really nice to see plot points adhering a little closer to the book, such as Waterloo, Valjean robbing Petit Gervais, Fantine’s relationship with Felix, etc. 

The cast is also quite good - then again, it’s the BBC, they usually get pretty competent actors. Still a little salty that it seems Fantine will always have brown hair in adaptations, but I’ve kind of become resigned to that. Lily Collins isn’t my ultimate Fantine, but she did well with what she was given with. Despite the decisions made for her character, Erin Kellyman was also a great Eponine (when she died, I saw the bullethole on her hand, kudos for details). In a better adaptation, I’m sure she would have been straight up amazing. Also I’m glad they showed you that Fantine was being tricked by the Thenardiers, whereas in the musical you didn’t see that at all. Enjolras and Grantaire’s deaths sadly didn’t involve the “Do you permit it” line, but I thought it was still rather beautiful. 

And Derek Jacobi was a great Bishop. He can do no wrong. 

Okay, onto the bad. *cracks knuckles*

I find it incredible how even though Andrew Davies stated the series would be closer to the novel, he got many characterizations way off, especially Valjean. You know you have a problem when your main character is doing stuff even fans who’ve only seen the musical know he’d never do. Like, why the hell did he have to be the one who fired Fantine? Valjean is far too understanding, too kind to kick out a person for having a secret kid. It’s ridiculous. Making it even worse, his relationship with adult Cosette is awful. He’s overprotective for sure, but the series makes him look utterly possessive, and that’s just gross. 

Poor Cosette can never catch a break when it comes to adaptation. I was so hyped up to see a girl who was sassy and clever and kind, but nope! She has even less personality than her musical version, which is saying something. Funny how Andrew Davies said that he didn’t like how weak Victor Hugo’s female characters were (a bullshit statement if he actually read the book), but if he had such a problem with them, he didn’t...you know, make them people with real agency. You’re a writer for god’s sake, Mr. Davies! 

Javert might not be my favourite character, but I do find him very fascinating. It was fingerbitingly irritating to see him focus on nothing but arresting Valjean. The fandom does make jokes about him being like that, but we know there’s more to him than just a desire to arrest a guy who stole a loaf of bread. Also, I just facepalmed when he said he valued arresting Valjean over the revolution in the streets. People are dying, you dolt! I thought you devoted your life to protecting the public. Not to mention him thinking Valjean would be leading the revolution was just really weird. I’m honestly rather sad to see him reduced to that, because I frankly really like David Oyelowo as an actor.      

The Les Amis were almost a complete disappointment. They were just so boring. Which is not something I want to say about a group of revolutionaries! Enjolras doesn’t give a speech until mere hours before his death, so I wasn’t sold on him being a charismatic leader. Also...he was brunette. And had a pornstache. All right, it’s fine if he’s not blond (Ramin Karimloo comes to mind as an awesome not blond Enjolras), but you’d think if they were going to be loyal to the book, they’d make sure to add the detail that Enjolras is basically Apollo with how many times Victor Hugo mentioned him being blond. Also, they cut the group completely in half. I missed my precious Joly and Combeferre (sob). At least Courfeyrac was adorable as he always is. Grantaire is okay - at least there was a hint he loved Enjolras. I still say George Blagden and Hadley Fraser are the quintessential Grantaires, though. 

Marius. It was so uncomfortable seeing him acting so smooth. Marius Pontmercy is a quirky and awkward Napoleonic Democrat and that’s how I like him. That’s why I loved Eddie Redmayne so much - his singing voice wasn’t Tony material, but he was perfectly awkward and adorably heartsick. Also that freaking wet dream sequence - what the flying fuck was that?! Marius is a romantic idiot, not a horny one. 

And finally, my biggest problem of all, Andrew Davies himself. I really don’t understand why his writing was so lame here when he also wrote for the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, which I thought was really good. Even War and Peace, despite its flaws, had genuinely beautiful moments. Also, like everybody else, I was pretty annoyed when he called the musical a “travesty” and his version was going to “save” Hugo’s novel. Yeah, shit over the millions of people who were introduced to the story through the musical (like me). The show is nearly forty years old, of course people are going to compare the series to the musical. 

And speaking of the musical...does anyone else find it really odd that many shots looked like they were straight up ripped off from the 2012 film, which was of course a musical? Talk about ironic. Wonder what Tom Hooper would say about that.

The last shot to end the series also pissed me off for some reason, showing Gavroche’s little brothers sitting on the street without him begging to passerby, who ignore them. Les Miserables is a story about hope for Pete’s sake, you’d think it’d end on a better high than that. Essentially, it’s like they’re giving a giant middle finger to everyone watching. I know this was also in the Brick and Victor Hugo meant to send a different message, but the one we got looked irritatingly cynical. The message the series tells us is that the revolution failed, and nothing is going to get better - a message that directly contradicts what Victor Hugo was trying to say with the whole damn story. (This scene also serves as a lesson to anyone not familiar with the adaptation process: Just because it works on the page doesn’t mean it can work onscreen.)

Come on BBC, you make amazing shows. You can do better than this. 

[bbclesmis]

Les Miserables remake to be shown on TV this Christmas

Promising to be a significant event in this year's Christmas TV schedule is the no-singing remake of the gut-wrenching Les Miserables.

Whether you've seen the 2012 film, watched the musical on stage or read the novel - chances are you'll know the classic tale.

Now, a six-part BBC One mini-series Les Miserables promises a new look at the classic story, which is set against the epic backdrop of 1845 France - a time of civil unrest.

Cast members Dominic West, Lily Collins and David Oyelowo have revealed what viewers can expect from the adaptation.

The protagonist of the story is Jean Valjean, who is struggling to lead a normal life after serving a prison sentence for stealing bread to feed his sister's children.

And for Sheffield-born Dominic West, star of The Wire and The Affair, the appeal of playing him is simple.

"He's the best superhero that's ever been written about," said the 49-year-old.

Meanwhile, it's a dream come true for Lily Collins, 29 - who is the daughter of musician Phil Collins - to play orphaned, working-class Fantine. She grew up loving musicals like Les Mis.

However, the actress, who played Snow White in the film Mirror Mirror, loves the fact that the BBC version doesn't feature any singing.

"It's really fun to play the part that people have played before, but in a way no-one's seen before," said the Guilford-born star, who moved to LA as a child with her mother.

"We get to see her meet her friends, meet her lover, be wooed, and go out on dates and actually fall in love and have the child," added Collins.

"And then she goes on the journey that everyone mostly knows."

David Oyelowo, who was born in Oxford to Nigerian parents, takes on the role of Javert, a police inspector who becomes obsessed with the pursuit and punishment of convict Valjean.

And the 42-year-old admits he was pleasantly surprised when he was offered the part.

"It's the kind of role that growing up in the UK you just accept, 'Well, I love watching that, but that's never going to be me'," confided the actor, known for films such as Selma and A United Kingdom.

"I'm elated that we are in a time and a world where it's not any sort of big move on the BBC's part or Tom's [Shankland, director] part or the producer's part to approach me with a role like this.

"I'm just so glad that 12-year-olds that look like me are going to get to see images that I didn't get to see when I was their age, and would have been formative for me."

Much of the drama in Les Mis revolves around the cat-and-mouse relationship between the characters of Jean Valjean and Javert.

"Javert sees Jean Valjean as a mirror to himself," explained Oyelowo.

"Javert was born in a prison, he was born to gypsy parents, he was born in and around criminality. And that is the thing he is pushing away from obsessively for all of his life."

Both actors enjoyed scrutinising the text to develop their characters.

"We've spent a lot of time just trying to nail down what makes this feel real, because the book itself relies heavily on coincidence," noted Oyelowo.

On exploring the motivations of their characters, West elaborates: "We had a bit of trouble at first, thinking, 'What's Javert's problem? Why is he so obsessed with this dude?'

"But it all became easier when David starting doing Javert in a London accent, and I started doing Jean Valjean in a Yorkshire accent!"

Collins' preparation, meanwhile, saw her speak to Anne Hathaway, who won an Oscar for her role as Fantine in the film.

She was told: "Good luck, and do your own thing.

"I was heavily inspired by that movie. But Tom also wanted it to be about the literature, not basing it on someone else's work.

"In any role I do there is a little bit of pressure to do my best because I'm my own harshest critic, let alone when you're playing a literary character that people love."

West said that because the book - which he calls "the best book" he's ever read - is a lot less known than the musical, it takes the pressure off a bit.

"It's huge, epic, magic, romantic, heroic, incredibly morally challenging and morally interesting.

"People will play this part forever because it's a great classic part, and the reason is there's so many ways to come at it."

What also makes the tale timeless is its themes, such as guilt and revenge. And West also pointed out that there are parallels with today's society in terms of the class struggle depicted in the show.

"Les Miserables is about the poor people... and their fight against injustice and plutocrats running over them," he said. "It's all pretty relevant."

West admitted he's been "in tears all day" on set (the series was filmed in Brussels and northern France).

"I can't stop crying," he said. "I just love this man. It's quite hard to make a good guy interesting, and really care about a good guy, but he's just... strong and courageous."

He continued: "I've got loads of kids, and I've played a lot of villains and I don't want to be a villain, I don't find them interesting anymore. So I love playing this hero."

Collins agrees she's been affected by filming the sadness in Fantine's story.

"I obviously feel what my character's feeling, but I also try at the end of the day to leave some of that at work.

"Even though I'm alone here in Brussels, I'm going out and spending time with people and also being able to see friends in London, and FaceTime... I don't have to live in a bubble."

Filming away from home does of course poses its challenges, as Oyelowo, who now lives in LA, candidly reveals.

"I have four kids and a wife who I miss so terribly," said the star.

"But she and I have a two-week rule - we're never apart for more than two weeks. So, a lot of flying back and forth. You make it work.

"But that's partly why this is the first time I've done anything of this nature since I did Spooks, because it takes up so much time and I have young children. But this was one I couldn't say no to."

Watch Les Miserables on BBC One over the Christmas period. (x)

[everyonewasabird]

@fremedon I’m going to move the conversation about Grantaire’s revolution rant to it’s own post! Hope that’s okay.

(beware, this got LONG, oh my god)

@fremedon said:

Coming back to Grantaire and “Preliminary Gaieties,” I’m thinking about that speech again in light of this post.

All the metaphors about God throwing a revolution to cover his bankruptcy are in service of a point that Grantaire also states in (for him) remarkably plain language–that as much as he would like for progress to occur smoothly and automatically, it doesn’t:

“What the rest of you call progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary troupe suffices neither for event, nor for men: among men geniuses are required, among events, revolutions.”

He spends three pages circling back to the idea of revolution, and every time he lands on the same point–that it’s not only inevitable, but necessary; that the universe is badly made and God is unable to set it right without human action, which means revolution.

And then there’s this passage, which is kind of key to the whole thing (switching from Hapgood to FMA):

“Oh! By all saints of Olympus and all the gods of Paradise, I was not made to be a Parisian, that is to say, to richochet forever, like a shuttlecock between two rackets, from the company of loafers to the company of rioters!”

He introduces a list of loafers–the group he says he was born to be part of–ending with “a petty Germanic prince, furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier.” This list balances Floreal’s banker, from the start of the speech–another idler in this vein, whose conquest of the grisette is explicitly equated with Brennus’s sack of Rome.

Grantaire wants to be idle; he wants to enjoy the appearances that God is trying so hard to keep up, but he’s seen through them; he understands that even the illusion of smooth social functioning that revolution and riot disrupts is still violent at every level, from the sack of cities to the defense of micro-states to Floreal’s poverty. He gets it, he sees the violence inherent in the system and he understands that any action to change will, under the circumstances, necessarily also be violent.

Philosophically and politically, he pretty much agrees with the Amis about how the world is and what it would take to change it.

And then he finally says the thing it’s taken him three pages and a bottle of wine to say, and that no one in the book has really said outright yet:

“And it appears that they are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to break each other’s profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows!”

They all know that just their political association, let alone the kind of organizing they’re doing, could on its own get themselves killed. They’ve been part of a network amassing weapons with the full intention of taking to the streets with them. They all know that if–when–it does come to insurrection, their lives will all be on the line.

No one talks about it. No one, before this point, ever acknowledges it out loud.

And when Grantaire finally does–in front of Joly and Bossuet! Who watched the funeral cortege go by and decided to have brunch instead! Who are very much on the side of Yes Do Notice the Flowers and the Spring!–what’s the response?

“Speaking of revolution,” said Joly, “it appears that Marius is decidedly amorous.”

“Does anyone know who it is?”

“No.”

THEY ARE SO DESPERATE TO CHANGE THE SUBJECT. THAT THEY RESORT TO GOSSIP. ABOUT MARIUS.

They don’t even HAVE any gossip about Marius! “SPEAKING OF REVOLUTION… … … OH HEY COURFEYRAC’S ROOMMATE HAS A CRUSH. On someone. Allegedly.” This is not even the “How about that local sports team” of subject changes. This is just flat refusal to engage with anything Grantaire has said.

In my headcanon, about 80% of Grantaire’s position as Resident Skeptic* comes down to this: that he sees as clearly as any of them do that their ideals, if taken to their logical conclusion lead to violent revolution, and that the chances of that revolution accomplishing anything significant are slim compared to the chances of their all getting killed. And that aside from Enjolras, most of them deal with this through flat-out denial.

Grantaire’s a depressive. He is Very Bad at denying unpleasant truths. He is self-medicating very hard just to be able to ignore enough of the world’s unpleasantness to get up in the morning. He works really, really, hard to see the flowers and the spring and enough of a bright side to go on with this life that they are all so willing to throw away on such a slim hope.

He really can’t get on board with just…hoping that the suicidally rash inevitable endgame will work out for the best. But the only one of them who appears to have any other coping mechanism is Enjolras, who conceives of himself as an instrument of war trying to make himself obsolete–whose metric of success is self-annihilation. Which I think Grantaire understands very well and wishes he didn’t.

*The other 20% is tied up with his objectification of Enjolras. In the very literal, “what a fine statue,” “Je crois à toi”  sense. Enjolras is an abstract concept? Grantaire’s a skeptic; Enjolras is a god? Grantaire’s an atheist; Enjolras is a statue? Grantaire’s an art school dropout.  If he can make Enjolras something other than a person, then he doesn’t have to take him seriously; he doesn’t have to worry about letting him down.

everyonewasabird:

Ooh, you and I are reading a LOT of things differently! Interesting!

So I don’t think I disagree about what Grantaire is saying but about how it lands: he’s wrong. He sees the problems of the world--and in his bitterness invents extra problems, like women marrying bankers, which is not an actual problem, Grantaire--and despair makes him think nothing can be changed. And Joly and Bossuet know he’s wrong.

On the “new mown hay” line--firstly, oh my god, Hapgood’s translatation of that is a travesty. That passage is gorgeous.

Here’s Wilbour:

“And it appears that they are going to fight, all these idiots, to get their heads broken, to massacre one another, in midsummer, in the month of June, when they might go off with some creature under their arm, to scent in the fields the huge cup of tea of the new mown hay! Really they are too silly.”

...God, it’s so beautiful. Anyway.

It’s worth noting that this passage is not like the rest of the speech. Grantaire was being racist and sexist and gross like a sentence ago, and he undercuts his own eloquence with “Really they are too silly” a sentence after. I think the magic in his spark of sincerely expressed fear and regret here is real! And I think Hugo and the brick feel that regret and that loss. But I don’t think Hugo and the brick agree that therefore it would be better to just not have the revolution.

About Grantaire you said:

He works really, really, hard to see the flowers and the spring and enough of a bright side to go on with this life

I don’t agree. I think Grantaire is trudging on with a life that fills him with horror and which he barely tolerates, and the one good thing he has are the people he surrounds himself with who actually do pay attention to flowers and spring and the bright side--like Joly and Bossuet, who keep making jokes for exactly this purpose. Like the joke about Marius and revolution!

It’s not that Bossuet and Joly value their lives less or are paying less attention to the cost of the fight than Grantaire is--it’s that they value the world more. They love their lives--hence their last, joyous brunch instead of the boring, rainy parade--and they love the world, and they believe enough in hope for the world that they will willingly and joyfully give those lives to fix it. That’s not the same thing!

I don’t read “speaking of a revolution, Marius is amorous” as avoidance at all--handling catastrophe with good humor is Joly and Bossuet’s whole thing. Grantaire is spiraling into despair that Bossuet and Joly don’t share, since they’ve committed to this fight and made their peace with it. So they redirect Grantaire’s collapsing despair spiral with the joke that Marius--whom they must think of as a massive prude, given, well, them--suddenly caring about romance constitutes a revolution on par with the one they’re planning. Honestly, I thought it was pretty funny!

I don’t think anyone is facing the revolution with denial--I’m not following where that idea comes from. It seems to me the Amis are brave and selfless and committed and good, and they see revolution as worth doing, and if they die in the effort, they see that as worth it. I think everyone but Grantaire is fully on board with that.

A LOT of my feeling that the text of the brick is adamantly pro-revolution comes from this post from pilferingapples, ostensibly about the Waterloo digression. This post seriously upended how I think of the revolution plot of the brick versus its weird bourgeois ending--honestly, it completely changed how I think about this book and just...books in general. I can’t overstate what that bit of meta did to me.

On Enjolras... oh wow, we’re seeing very different characters!

You say:

Enjolras, who conceives of himself as an instrument of war trying to make himself obsolete–whose metric of success is self-annihilation.

I definitely see the instrument of war thing! And I think he always saw the (possibility? probability? certainty?) that the world he fought for would not include him. But I don’t think his metric of success is self-annihilation. That might be Valjean’s, but I don’t think it’s his. I think Enjolras’s metric of success is the world being saved.

I think of Enjolras as the great moral victor of the story. Inasmuch as he has flaws, they’re about being too absolute and sublime, to the exclusion of all else. That’s not a damning flaw, and in embracing Grantaire he transcends it. Far from tending towards self-annihilation, he seems to me a character of nigh-superhuman resilience, too full of love for his friends and humanity and faith in a better world ever to break, under any circumstances. I don’t think his willingness to die is abnegation--I think it’s genuine love for the world and faith that even in defeat, he and his friends have moved humanity closer to a better future.

(I hope that wasn’t too combative! I’m happy to argue further! :D)

[douxreviews]

Les Misérables (2012) Review

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Raw but beautiful, gritty but with a heavy dose of spectacle, Les Misérables is an amazing achievement for director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) that largely, but not entirely, lives up to the hype. How's that for nutshelling?


Before I begin here, I have to tell you all something truly shocking. I’ve never seen “Les Misérables” performed on stage. I know, I know. It’s crazy. In my defense, well, actually I really don’t have anything to say in my defense.

This summer I think I made up for it, however, by reading the book. The whole book. Every word of the book including the three chapters about the history and geography of the Parisian sewer system. I’m not being funny. They’re in there. And they’re about as interesting as they sound. I’m very glad I read the book, however, because it got me genuinely excited to see the movie. The story is much more than the handful of songs I’d heard before. It’s beautiful tale of redemption and love, set to truly wonderful music.

This version also boasts a truly wonderful cast including Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Helena Bonham Carter. Also, Russell Crowe is in it. This was the first musical ever done with the actors singing their parts live, not lip syncing to track. It turned out fantastic, particularly for the more emotionally wrought scenes. “I Dreamed a Dream” and “On My Own” were both as amazing as you could expect, and I was surprised at how affecting Hugh Jackman’s performance of “Valjean’s Soliloquy” was.

Other favorite performances include “Master of the House,” which was absolutely hilarious (except the bit with the cat... gross) and the finale which had me crying oh so hard. “Do You Hear the People Sing?” always gets me. I’m seriously misting up just thinking about it.

I don’t think I can overstate how good Anne Hathaway’s performance was. I love how un-actressy she let herself look. Dirty, red, tired, and sickly: most actresses would have balked at allowing themselves to be tossed up on Imax looking thus. Not to mention that she actually shaved her head for the part. More impressive was that fact that Hathaway’s performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” was from one take, with no cutting. Apparently she did twenty of them in a row before Hooper made her stop. They used number four.

Hathaway reportedly did not eat for thirteen days to achieve Fantine’s gaunt frame (in addition to her months of austere dieting). Jackman deprived himself of water for thirty-six hours to make his cheeks look sunken. As much as I hate aggrandizing this sort of self-abuse, I have to say it was kind of worth it. The were both absolutely fantastic.

Amanda Seyfried’s Cosette was relatively vapid and uninteresting, which is how she is written, so kudos to her for that. Seyfried was very good in the final scene, and to her credit, I didn’t once quote Mean Girls in my head. (“There’s a thirty percent chance that it’s already raining”). Eddie Redmayne was a pleasant surprise. He’s been doing theatre in England for quite a while, but, not living there, I’d never heard of him. He did a very good job (excepting the scene where Jean Valjean confesses his past and Marius sits there with a stupid grin on his face). And, can I just say, hello hottie! I mean, seriously. Gorgeous man.

Also new to me was Samantha Barks, who plays Éponine. She was fantastic. There had been rumors that the role might have been taken by Lea Michele or Taylor Swift. Can I just thank whoever made the decision to nix Princess Glee and Princess Teardrops on My Guitar? Don’t get me wrong, I love Taylor Swift (and would kill for her wardrobe and a tailor to fit it to someone half a foot shorter), but the role is a difficult one. I just don’t think she has the raw acting talent the role requires.

I expected to see this film and weep continuously throughout the whole thing, exiting the theater emotionally exhausted and slightly dehydrated. I did cry (a lot). But I also laughed. Hard. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter stole every damn scene they were in. And did so hilariously. I’m not a fan of Baron Cohen’s, but he was perfectly cast in this role. Helena Bonham Carter is always magnificent, even when Tim Burton’s not directing.

Of course, every film has its flaws. May I present to you: Russell Crowe. Unlike many, my problem with his performance wasn’t his relatively weak singing voice. I feel like in a movie with such gritty performances, imperfection in song would have been tolerated. He just added nothing to the character. He wasn’t acting so much as reciting (or rather, singing) his lines. Javert is an intensely interesting and conflicted character, obsessed with the capture of Jean Valjean and obsessed with his position in society as an upholder of the law. Crowe’s interpretation was weak, even boring. It was sad. There were rumors that Gerard Butler was going to be cast as Javert, which I think would have been an improvement. Ah, well, no crying over spilt milk.

I love the interpretation of the Friends of the ABC as silly, idealistic boys. It makes the whole June Rebellion much more tragic, and it’s probably more accurate. If you’re off to see the movie and you don’t know much about the time period, I highly recommend doing a bit of research. The politics are somewhat confusing and the film spends much more time on its characters than explaining what Enjolras and Marius were trying to accomplish and why. That would have been a different film, and probably a less musical one. Wikipedia ‘June Rebellion.’ It’s well worth your time.

As for the movie’s much-hyped Oscar chances, I make these predictions: it will be nominated for Best Picture but lose (probably to Lincoln). Hugh Jackman may or may not get nominated for Best Actor but will not win (Daniel Day-Lewis has that wrapped up), and Anne Hathaway will (and most definitely should) win for Best Supporting Actress. Also, they’ll probably win Best Original Song, even though “Suddenly” is not fantastic and did not flow with the rest of the music very well.

I highly recommend the film to everyone with the caveat that you probably will cry, so bring some tissues. Oh, and, because I’m a giant nerd, here’s a summation of the plot I found on the internet:

four out of four dreams dreamt in times gone by

sunbunny

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.5.10 “Outcome Of The Success”

It’s long, I’m sorry. There’s just so much in this chapter!

The chapter’s first paragraph is a description of the misery of winter weather, bookended by sentences about Fantine. It’s been nearly a year since she was fired. The bit about winter is a description of Fantine’s descent as well as the weather. Winter brings short days which means less work; Fantine’s position in society means she’s finding less work as well because she is essentially freelancing rather than working for an employer with steady jobs. “No heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning” is such a good description of the way everything is miserable and just blurs together when you’re trying to just stay alive. All the awful stuff is sharp and dull at the same time. “Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.” Fantine is starting to harden here; we see her become more shameless, tougher.

Fantine wears a cap after cutting her hair “so she was still pretty.” And this disappears so rapidly in this chapter. Her beauty is so important. Fantine is the only character aside from Enjolras who is repeatedly described as beautiful in a way that seems to really matter. (Cosette is also beautiful, but that description is almost entirely through Marius’ POV, rather than from a more general POV with Fantine.) The slow destruction of Fantines beauty--the discarding of her pretty clothes for peasant ones, her frequent tears, the loss of her hair and teeth, the torn and threadbare clothing--mirrors her social destruction. She desperately clings to her beauty by wearing a cap, but she obviously gives up pretty soon.

What fascinates me here is that Hugo mentions that Fantine admired Madeleine, like everyone else, but he also implies that she didn’t hate him straight away for her dismissal. In the previous chapters, her reaction is to accept the dismissal as a “just” decision. She works up her hatred by repeatedly telling herself it was his fault. It seems as though she lands on the right conclusion in the wrong way. She blames herself first, and only through gradually convincing herself does she start to blame Madeleine. He and his crap system are the ones to blame, but she comes to that conclusion in a roundabout way that feels like she still blames herself but is trying not to. Fantine has been a scapegoat for everyone up until now; Madeleine has become her scapegoat to avoid (incorrectly) blaming herself.

“If she passed the factory when the workers were at the door, she would force herself to laugh and sing.” She’s trying so hard to make them think they haven’t gotten to her, but it just makes it so much more obvious. The laughter and singing is the “wrong” reaction, and it makes everyone notice her even more, and judge her even harder. It’s just so sad because I can understand that behavior of trying so hard to act the opposite way of how you think people will expect you to, only it backfires and makes your true feelings all the more apparent, which gives even more fuel to the cruel people.

Fantine takes a lover out of spite, “a man she did not love.” There are a few things here that contrast with the grisettes of 1.3. This lover is someone Fantine does not love, her first relationship since losing Tholomyes, who she was in love with. The man is also a street musician, which reminds me of Favourite’s actor/choir boy. The difference being that Favourite’s boy had at least some connections through his father, and Fantine’s lover is only a street musician. Fantine takes this lover in for the same reason that she sings and laughs outside the factory: to try and show that she’s unaffected, which really only serves to do the opposite. She has this affair “with rage in her heart,” which seems to be the only emotion left for her for anyone besides Cosette (and maybe Marguerite).

“She worshiped Cosette.” My only comment here is that this is something that Valjean will later echo. Both worship and adore Cosette as a point of light, something to cling to and love and care for.

Okay maybe I’m missing something here, but Fantine can read but she can’t write? This is probably my “been good at reading/writing my whole life” privilege talking, but wouldn’t she be able to write if she could read? I suppose maybe it’s like how I can look at numbers and understand the numbers but I can’t do math for shit? I don’t know. That just caught my eye.

Fantine is starting to lose her inhibitions as she begins to lose control of everything in her life. She’s laughing and singing and running and jumping around outside in public, she’s acting loud and brash and odd. Her reactions to her misfortune and the terrible things that keep happening express the “wrong” emotion. It’s an attempt to cope, and a courageous one, but it’s drastically different from the quiet Fantine who barely spoke that we were introduced to.

“Two Napoleons!” grumbled a toothless old hag who stood by. “She’s the lucky one!”

This line really struck me. We’ve been tunnel-visioned on Fantine’s misery this whole time. Suddenly the focus pulls back a little bit and we get a little bit of perspective. Fantine is not at rock bottom yet. She could still go so much lower. To this toothless old woman, she’s lucky because she’s pretty and because her teeth have worth. Fantine is poor, and cold, and worried about her kid, and most of the town laugh at or scorn her, and yet this old woman still thinks she’s the lucky one of the two of them. It’s a much more subtle commentary on the levels of poverty and abjectness that exist. Once you’ve fallen through the cracks in society to the level of homelessness, to the level of selling your teeth and hair and body, to complete aloneness, anyone who has even a scrap more than you seems “lucky.” And Fantine’s not too far from that existence.

The conversation between Marguerite and Fantine about military fever is so weird. Is Marguerite just saying stuff? This dialogue sounds like a conversation between two people who have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s like those scenes in comedies where one person pretends to be super confident about something to impress the other even though both of them are completely wrong. Oh okay wait! I just did some googling and I’ve realized that neither of them know what they’re talking about because Thenardier did his bad spelling thing! “Miliary fever” is an old medical term for an infection that causes fevers and bumpy skin rashes. (Mozart’s death is attributed to it; it seems to have fallen out of use as it became easier to pinpoint certain illnesses.) I think this isn’t just Marguerite not knowing what she’s talking about. This is a misunderstanding due to Thenardier’s misspelling (whether deliberate or not, I don’t know) and neither Marguerite nor Fantine know enough to realize it.

ETA: Okay wow I’m keeping that whole “miliary fever” thought journey in just to record my thought process but I’ve just double-checked against the Hapgood translation and the original French, and the mistake isn’t with the Thenardiers at all! It’s entirely the fault of the translators. The original French says “miliare” and Hapgood has translated it as “miliary”; Fahnestock and MacAfee clearly did not notice that the French was “miliare” and not “militaire,” and neither did their editors.

“During the night Fantine had grown ten years older.” Off the top of my head, I can only think of three instances of not-old people being blatantly described as looking old. This description here, Valjean when he returns from Arras, and Eponine. There are probably more I’m missing, but the connecting factor between these three is severe, prolonged trauma. Trauma and a difficult life can prematurely age people (I always think of that Dorothea Lange photo of the migrant mother who was only 32 but looks 50) and Hugo uses this fact to bolster his descriptions of what they go through. But Fantine and Valjean both age almost suddenly; Eponine is already old-looking the first time we meet her as a character with dialogue. Fantine’s sudden aging is another level of departure from her old life. In Paris, she was the youngest of the group, and now she looks far older than she is.

“Actually, the Thenardiers had lied to get her to get the money. Cosette was not sick at all.” As readers, we know this. We’ve seen the Thenardiers lie over and over and we see Fantine sacrifice with no idea. But this one hits harder than the others. Partly, I think, because Hugo puts it so bluntly in a sentence that has its own paragraph. But also because this is the first sacrifice that is truly unalterable. Fantine’s hair can grow back. There may have eventually been some slim chance of a job opportunity or something coming up somehow, or an influx of things needing mending or something. But she cannot regain her teeth. This is also the first sacrifice that physically disfigures her in a visible way. She can hide her lack of hair under a cap, she can hide her lack of money by using and reusing things. She cannot hide her missing teeth.

It’s interesting that we do not hear about Mme Victurnien here. Rather than the last chapter, this would be the one where Victurnien would be “winning.” The consequences of Victurnien’s actions have now permanently affected Fantine’s life. Except I think the reason we don’t see her here is that she wouldn’t face it. She can look out her window at Fantine walking down the street in distress with her beauty intact and feel satisfaction, but if she saw Fantine walking down the street, toothless and hairless, I don’t think she would feel satisfaction, because she wouldn’t be able to connect her actions to this Fantine. Feeling satisfaction towards this level of misery would require acknowledging her participation in causing it. It’s one thing for the townspeople to laugh at or gawk at her, but I think claiming responsibility for her condition is something else altogether that I’m not sure Mme Victurnien would do.

Fantine throwing her mirror out the window is a strange sort of contrast compared to Eponine’s reaction to a mirror. Fantine cannot face her descent. Eponine is already there, and her excitement at Marius’ mirror is a weird sort of distracted examination of herself. Fantine cannot bear to examine herself because unlike Eponine, she can remember what it was like before this. Tossing away the mirror is tossing away the thoughts of her past life and her past self; she can’t ever go back to that.

“The poor cannot go to the far end of their rooms or to the far end of their lives, except by continually bending more and more.”

God I don’t really even know what to say about this line except ouch. It’s just so poignant and intense. The older you get the harder it is to survive, to get up with each new stumble. And we can also take into account things like the cholera epidemic that will occur a few years later in the book, which mostly affected the poor. There’s so little access to any sort of help or assistance. And clearly Valjean’s few little systems of aid aren’t good enough. He may have set up a worker’s infirmary and a place for children or old workmen, but there doesn’t seem to be assistance for single, unsupported women, or the homeless and unemployed. They’re left to bend more and more under the weight of life.

“Her little rose bush dried up in the corner, forgotten.” I can’t help but read this as a parallel to the Thenardier’s treatment of Cosette. As Fantine falls apart and falls behind on her payments, Cosette is growing up which means the abuse from the Thenardiers has probably increased. It also feels like a weird sort of throwback to the spring/summertime imagery of beauty and chasteness and modesty from back in 1.3, which has now completely disappeared and dried up as Fantine loses her beauty, her modesty, and her coquetry.

I love the little detail about Fantine’s butter bell full of water and the frozen ice marks. It’s such a small detail but so evocative. It also feels like a metaphor for each of Fantine’s new hardships. Every time the butter pot freezes over, it leaves a ring of ice for a long time; each time Fantine encounters a new trauma, she hardens and becomes tougher. She keeps her dried up, long gone modesty and youth in one corner and the suffering that has hardened her in the other. On a side note, I’m wondering if there is actually butter in her butter bell or if she’s now using it only for water? I would imagine water only; butter seems like something that might be expensive. Also, would the building she’s living in have had indoor plumbing, or would she have gotten water from a well or a pump somewhere? My plumbing history knowledge is lacking.

Hugo describes Fantine’s torn and badly mended clothes. At this point she’s working as a seamstress, which means she’s at least proficient in the skills needed to sew and/or mend clothes in such a way that they stay together. This means that the repairs done for herself are likely careless and messy. I think this is partly an indication of how little time she has for herself--if she’s sewing for work for 17 hours a day, she has very little time to mend her own stuff, and definitely can’t afford better quality material--and partly an indication of the ways in which she is falling apart. She doesn’t bother mending her things properly, she goes out in dirty clothes. She doesn’t mend her stockings, she just stuffs them further down in her shoes. It seems she has only one or perhaps no good petticoats, which means she’s probably walking around in just a shift and a dress. Not only is her stuff threadbare and falling apart, she’s also probably freezing due to the lack of layers.

“A constant pain in her shoulder near the top of her left shoulder blade.” This makes me wonder if Fantine’s left-handed. If she’s sewing by hand, by candlelight, in a shitty rush chair, for seventeen hours a day, that is absolute murder on the back/shoulders/neck. Whenever I do hand-sewing I’m usually sat on the floor or my bed, and my back and upper shoulders tend to get sore if I get in the zone and I’m bent over the work for a long time. I don’t know about French dressmakers, but I know around that time the English were really big on very small, neat, almost invisible stitches. Which would hurt to do for seventeen hours a day by candlelight.

“She hated Father Madeleine profoundly, and she never complained.” The Hapgood translation of this line is better, I think. Still, I think it’s important that it’s pointed out that she never voices her opinions or her complaints. It’s only when Madeleine is in front of her that she announces them at all (despite not speaking directly to him then, either). She hates Valjean, she blames him, and yet obviously some part of her still thinks that she deserves it, or that her dismissal was right.

“She sewed seventeen hours a day, but a contractor who was using prison labor suddenly cut the price, and this reduced the day’s wages of free-laborers to nine sous.” Reading this book is always a lot because aside from the still-relevant general overarching commentary about society and poverty and mutual aid and goodness and all that, there are so many smaller details that are so painfully, strangely relevant to the present day. Even today there’s fear that employers will come up with a new policy or a new labor shortcut that means less income. Employers who pay their employees less because the workers get tipped, or outsourcing that causes layoffs. Prison labor, too (and behind that, the fact that prison labor doesn’t guarantee a job in a similar field after release if desired).

In the next two chapters, we jump ahead somewhere between a few weeks to a couple months. What happened to Marguerite in the interim? Hugo describes her as a “pious woman [...] of genuine devotion,” but I have this sad thought that maybe when Fantine made the decision to become a sex worker, Marguerite may have turned her back on her as well. As we’ve seen with Valjean, being poor but modest is Good, and being poor and desperate enough to do something improper and “immoral” is Bad. Despite Marguerite’s canonical generosity towards the poor, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fantine’s decision overstepped some moral boundaries of hers.

“But where is there a way to earn a hundred sous a day?” I’m a little stuck on this. Would she make this much money? I’m basing the following information off of Luc Sante’s The Other Paris, so the monetary info might be slightly different a for non-Parisian area. According to Sante, someone like Fantine, a poor woman working without a pimp or madame and not in a legal brothel, would basically be working for pocket change. 100 sous would equal about 5 francs. If her earnings are basically pocket change, I don’t think she’d make 5 francs a day. Just considering the fact that a loaf of bread might cost about 15 sous, which seems like pocket change, or even slightly more than pocket change. Fantine probably becomes a sex worker and finds herself in the exact same position that she was in before, not making any more money than she would have if she had continued to be a seamstress.

[pilferingapples]

Les Mis BBC: First Episode First Impression

Well, the actors are as excellent as I hoped they would be!

Cut for Spoilers or whatever term applies here

I really really really wanted to be wrong in all my misgivings about this series. I wanted to be blown out of the water by the whole thing, and have to make repentant posts about the error of my ways. 

Alas, this is not a Repentant Post. 

I liked some things! The set and scenery and props were all genuinely lovely. I enjoyed the animals everywhere? and the nigh-omnipresent beggars in Paris? Nicely done!  And I really, genuinely, appreciate the constant background French; I know just enough to recognize it when I hear it and it does add something to the atmosphere of the piece. 

The actors! What great performances! I want it clear that NOTHING I have to say in the way of character critique is down to them. Oyelowo is as good as I’d hoped he’d be, and that is saying a lot; Collins is doing a wonderful job with Fantine’s shyness and defiant hope; and the bit-part characters like Magloire and Nicolette are really standout. 

I really appreciate the inclusion of the Pontmercy Family situation, and Gillenormand being placed in this first episode makes his social relevance more clear IMO; he feels less like random comic relief than he sometimes can. Really, the whole Pontmercy-Gillenormand family conflict is a standout in the episode; Gillenormand’s emotional manipulation of Tiny Marius and  general domestic tyrannizing was very effectively shown (the scene with the toy soldiers!!!), and my heart was broken all over for Marius and for Georges. And Tholomyes is an amazingly perfect skeezeball; his PUA approach is clear and skin-crawling from the start.

*** Real quick Basic Plot Rundown: this episode covers roughly the era from Waterloo to Fantine being abandoned by Tholomyes. I say roughly  because it weirdly changes the timeline of Fantine’s life to sync up more with Valjean’s;he gets released and goes through the silver theft with the Bishop when she’s getting dumped.   The issue with that is of course that in the book Fantine is dumped in 1817 (the year 1817, when it was 1817); Cosette should just about be getting born around the year of Napoleon’s defeat and Valjean’s release, and now I guess she’s about a year old? This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big issue for chronology if the show’s just going to have Fantine and Cosette suffer for an extra two years (though: D:D:D:D: ) , and heaven knows Hugo is shifty on personal timelines, but...Les Mis *does* have certain unavoidable historical events it has to sync up with, so I’ll see how it plays out. 

Besides Valjean’s last little while in prison and Fantine’s courtship and abandonment, this first episode covers the Georges-Gillenormand-Marius family situation, with Georges limping home from Waterloo only to be refused access to his son. The show cuts between the three ongoing stories so they all progress more or less in sync. We get far enough along to see Georges watching his son in church without Gillenormand knowing (thanks to Nicolette, who’s the only woman in the Gillenormand house so far), Fantine holding Cosette in their apartment and wondering what they’re going to do after Tholomyes leaves them, and Valjean curled up in the road after robbing Petit Gervais.

Okay, Actual Commentary time! Please assume a Personal Opinion disclaimer for things after this point:P 

***

Several of the people I was watching with felt the constant cutting between scenes was jarring or hard to follow; I don’t know if that was the issue but I do think, overall, it just didn’t work as well as it might have. The individual scenes were very brief and the constant bouncing back and forth prevented them from building up any emotional momentum. I think..conceptually, I can see where it would be interesting to twine Valjean, Fantine, and Georges together, in many ways, but none of that thematic connection really came through either (Maybe most disappointingly to me, Valjean’s family is never mentioned, so the potential to connect all three of them as families torn apart by social inequality is lost). It really felt like just Three People Having a Bad Time in France.  it really is hard to follow, because it starts to feel...kinda dull , just a collection of sad anecdotes for no purpose. 

The dialogue doesn’t help. When the show leans heavily on Hugo’s writing (sadly, mostly with Tholomyes) , it’s fine, of course. But the original dialogue is clunky, pedantic, and weirdly flat throughout--and utterly lacking in nuance. It just aggressively clunks at points. 

Valjean and Javert suffer the most for this. Javert basically states aloud his share of the Confrontation while lecturing a bound Valjean for ...reasons?? It’s never really clear. But hey, here you go, Valjean, have Javert’s entire backstory! ( I should say that Oyelowo almost sells it. He is incredible , and does a great job making Javert feel both his adamant self and humanly affected by the world around him. Just. some of this dialogue. Geez.)  This is also one of those episodes with a weirdly more unpleasant Valjean; he doesn’t assault the Bishop, but he does  much more consciously rob Petit Gervais, laughing as he scares the kid away and grinning as he first examines the coin. He also just...yells at people a lot? and argues with the Bishop and asserts his hatred of mankind very bluntly. I found it hard to believe this Valjean had any of the original’s internalized self-hatred or sense of being  lower than a dog; he seems  solidly outraged by his treatment, and confident of the injustice of it all. Which is definitely fair and all, but just...isn’t quite Valjean.

 (Also, as I mentioned above, we don’t really get any of his pre-prison backstory; not an unusual adaptational move, but it sure doesn’t add anything to his motivation.) He seems both more casually violent and less emotionally deep than I’d expect a Valjean to be; I can’t believe , at least not yet, that he’s actually felt the Bishop’s forgiveness as a challenge in any way, even though the Gervais scene ends with him curled in the road--it just doesn’t feel connected. 

Fantine does  get more time--unfortunately, and unavoidably, much of that involves Felix:P . There’s also some brief conversation with Favourite about the general situation of grisettes. I think it’s a good addition, and puts in some useful context. (That said, I’m deeply uneasy about the attempt to portray Fantine and Favourite as actual  friends-so much of Fantine’s story comes from her being really truly isolated. If she’d had real friends to help in the crunch, it would change things-- and if she thinks  Favourite is a real friend and then Favourite fades on her, that’s even worse than canon and makes Favourite  worse than in canon. Hence, Unease.)  

Visually, there’s ..I won’t say nothing wrong,  and certainly I can have fun for ages going over the details of this or that outfit or hairstyle (and I really do  find the weird combos of Looks to be very distracting; if I knew less about the period it wouldn’t be,no doubt, but I do  know a lot about How It Should Look and the fact that it doesn’t  Quite sometimes makes it all feel like it’s happening in a generic Fantasy 19C) . But there’s no BIG thing wrong, it’s...fine?  

It’s just ... it’s just fine. There’s no particular strong visual feel to it, nothing really striking-- unless you count the weird 60s-Acid-flashback-looking timeskip moment. It really does  feel like LM 2012 in its more visually striking moments, and outside of that, it’s just very much a competently filmed period drama made in the last ten years--but that’s all. Without the specific characters, I don’t think there’s a single frame of it I’d recognize as being necessarily Les Mis and not any other random BBC Period Drama. 

I guess this is really my problem with the characters and the story too-- it’s...Fine, it’s technically there , but too often there’s no sense of depth or specificity to it. Part of it’s the dialogue, part of it’s the weird pacing/ story jumps , part of it is because no one ever seems to be given a moment to respond-(Fantine crying for all of thirty seconds after being abandoned before the show decides we need her up and talking and dry-eyed was really actively jarring to me)--

There are a hundred little details I could go through but the overall effect for me was just a whole lot of Underwhelming. Yeah, there’s the Pee Scene and the (correct and fitting) visceral discomfort of Everything About Tholomyes (he ,at least, really is a Triumph of Skeeze). But the real problem so far is just that it feels like a visual outline of a story; it’s not pulling together into feeling like a lived world. It’s not taking my heart, even though, despite my surface grousing, I really want  it to.  It’s here, it’s fine, it’s Whatever; but all my really strong emotional reactions either Cringing  or Cooing (over the very excellent babies). My heart didn’t break but the once, with Tiny Marius, and it really really  should have been in pieces by the end of the episode. 

I’m of course  going to keep watching, as much of it as I can find a way to see; it’s Les Mis and I really  am  impressed with the actors.  Maybe next episode, when the various stories start to come together a little, it’ll all feel more solid and more memorable. Right now, though, I’m sitting at a solid “ meh” about it.