Though Claude Lelouch may appear at first blush to be riding on Victor Hugo's coattails, that's precisely what he's not doing. This is no straight adaptation of the novel (much less an adaptation of the stage musical) nor even a simple update of it. For sure, there are correspondences between Lelouch's narrative and Hugo's: the powerful protagonist of the screen version frees a man pinned under a piano rather than under a horse-drawn cart, and instead of an account of the Battle of Waterloo we get the D-Day Invasion. One of the more original and refreshing aspects of the latter-day tale is that the characters in it are aware of these correspondences. Lelouch's illiterate hero (Jean-Paul Belmondo, turning into Charles Vanel in number and depth of facial lines) has heard all his life, without quite knowing why, that he is "a Valjean." And when he agrees to transport a fugitive Jewish family to the Swiss border during the Nazi occupation, he does so with the proviso that they read him the novel en route. A couple of these readings, or paraphrasings, are illustrated on screen by literal re-enactments of the original text (with Belmondo doubling as the prototypical Valjean). Teaching the hero about the book serves also, of course, to teach the viewer, so that no one will need to have studied the thing ahead of time in order to get the connections Lelouch draws to it, and so that Lelouch himself will not need to overstress or oversimplify the connections. And even while the movie is not remotely "faithful" to the novel, it nevertheless can be viewed as a declaration of faith in the novel's universality. This hommage edges also into something in the nature of self-revelation and self-analysis, or to say it another way, something in the nature of self-criticism, with Lelouch explicitly citing Hugo as a personal model, not just for his Romantic -- yes, capital "R" -- exaltation of the individual, the outcast, the outlaw, all throughout his filmmaking career, but also for his much derided storytelling predelections: the prominent role of chance and coincidence, of parallelism and recurrence, the road-windings and path-crossings, the sudden reversals, the surprise twists. With Philippe Léotard and Annie Girardot. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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