Les Misérables is a 1995 French drama film by Claude Lelouch. The film is not an adaptation of the seminal novel of the same name by Victor Hugo, and is not to be confused with the 1995 Filmed Stage Production of the musical. However, it takes heavy inspiration from Hugo's work — specifically, that the life of French everyman Henri Fortin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) begins to parallel the novel.
In German-occupied France, Andre and Elisa Ziman, a Jewish couple fleeing the Nazis, entrusts their daughter Salomé to Henri. Elisa is sent to a concentration camp, Andre is wounded and tended to by a local farmer, and Henri joins the resistance. After the war, Henri helps the family reunite and faces the ghosts of his past, including a former Nazi collaborator who has set his sights on him.
Tropes:
- Day of the Jackboot: Invoked. Hoping to be able to live off Andre's finances, Thénardier tells Andre that the Nazis have conquered Europe.
- Driven to Suicide: In the prologue, Henri's mother killed herself after learning that his father had died during a failed prison escape.
- The Everyman: Paralleling Jean Valjean, the protagonist Henri is really just some guy: an illiterate, orphaned, working-class man. However, his connections with the Zimans inspire good in both him and others.
- Meaningful Name: Some of the characters in the film share names with their analogues in Les Misérables: for example, the young bachelor rescued by the main character in the midst of D-Day who goes on to marry the film's ingenue is named Marius, same as Victor Hugo's Marius.
- A Minor Kidroduction: The film opens on a young Henri, showing the audience how he lost his parents and his earliest exposure to Les Misérables. It then jumps a few decades to World War II-era France.
- Mutual Kill: The farmer's wife shoots her husband when he attempts to poison Andre. He then chokes her to death as he's dying.
- No Name Given: The Javert analogue policeman is not named in the film.
- Run for the Border: Andre and Elisa attempt to cross the Swiss border to escape the Nazis, but are caught in the attempt.
- Separate Scene Storytelling: the main characters, inspired by acts of heroism from the novel, would play out their own lives as if they were the characters. This meant some sequences of the novel would be dramatically played out on screen (with the actors from the Nazi era playing the characters), some scenes where the action in the 1930s paraleled events and actions from the novel, and other ways as well.
- Shout-Out: Henri is named after the actor Henri-Marie "Harry" Baur, who played Jean Valjean in the 1934 French film version of Les Misérables and was later murdered by the Gestapo in 1943.
- Wedding Finale: The film ends on Salomé's wedding to Marius at Chez Jean Valjean.
