ABSTRACT
Founded on a mistrust of the Hollywood system and its ability to do justice to the literature of the old continent, the reception of American adaptations of Les Misérables in France has often been cool, if not glacial. Accordingly, Julien Boivent’s analysis of Bille August’s 1998 adaptation (see Plate 7) in Les Cahiers du Cinéma deemed that: “while it is important to say that the film does inevitably massacre Victor Hugo’s crowning glory, it is also the very essence of literary masterpieces to survive the deepest insults inflicted upon them, notably the almost welcomed abridgment” [“Il faut quand même dire que le film massacre forcément le monument de Victor Hugo, mais que c’est aussi le propre des chefs d’œuvres littéraires que de toujours survivre un peu à tous les profonds outrages qu’on peut leur faire, et notamment à cette cure d’amaigrissement assez réjouissante”]. Reaction was cooler still for the recent version by Tom Hooper (see Plate 16), who, in some ways, really stuck the knife in by adapting not directly from the novel but from the musical.1 The Cahiers called it a “dumbed-down and hyped-up drama” [“Dramaturgie schématique et boursouflée”], full of “pretentious organs” [“orgues pompières”] according to the Nouvel Observateur, and just misérable for almost everyone else. Apart from Le Figaro, which praised Hooper’s decision to take big risks, not many critics gave the director his dues.
