Les Indésirables

As with his award-winning debut, the French filmmaker sometimes risks heavy-handedness to make his points, but his argument’s brute force is amply persuasive.

Ly and Gederlini weave in keen analysis about political manipulation, structural violence and community organizing — a perceptiveness that makes Les Indésirables resonate despite its flaws.

Ly is, for the most part, much more somber and reined in here: he doesn’t focus too much on the direct, violent action conflicts as a trigger mechanism, instead showing the process-oriented political policy that inches towards the greater destruction of a vulnerable and underprivileged community.

Much like “Les Misérables” before it, “Les Indésirables” is a series of riveting setpieces that are strung together with a mess of exposed wires, and much like “Les Misérables” before it, “Les Indésirables” can be easy to forgive for its contrivances because Ly’s anger is so palpable, his vision so viscerally lived-in, and his widescreen cinema so capable of galvanizing suffering through spectacle (a mixed blessing).

After co-writing and producing Romain Graves’ own epic of civil unrest, 2022’s “Athena,” he steps behind the camera once more for his second feature directorial effort, “Les Indésirables,” and while the subject matter is just as timely, the overall result is slightly less scintillating.

By weighing everything so heavily, and obviously, in one direction, it eventually comes off as a thinly disguised sermon about ugly oppression and noble suffering and defiance.

Rejecting partisanship to affect the appearance of balance doesn’t make sense when dealing with situations defined by imbalance. Both Ly’s Hollywood bombast and impulse to undue generosity in his political convictions fight the vulcanized hardness of his bracing outrage, and ultimately prove little about today’s powder kegs.