Les misérables (2026), by Fred Cavayé

Fred Cavayé returns to Victor Hugo’s novel with an almost three-hour epic that turns its political dimension into a period spectacle. Presented in competition at San Sebastián, Les Misérables (2026) exposes the limitations of a film that mistakes the scale of its source material for the need to bring it back to the screen.

The persistence of inequality, institutional violence and social exclusion makes Hugo’s work fertile ground for thinking about the present. The problem arises when that continued relevance becomes sufficient justification for yet another adaptation. Cavayé moves through the novel’s major episodes, from Jean Valjean’s imprisonment to the barricades of Paris, with a structure that piles up destinies, misfortunes and moral conflicts. The breadth of the story allows us to recognise the complexity of its literary universe, while also revealing a narrative too concerned with ticking off each of its stations.

The film tries to accelerate the journey through chases, confrontations and bursts of violence. The result comes close to the kind of historical adventure cinema that the French industry has been developing around its major literary properties. Yet the constant movement rarely manages to transform the weight of the story into a cinematic experience with an identity of its own. The political dimension is repeatedly subordinated to a succession of episodes whose outcomes we already know.

The film’s considerable running time does little to deepen this perspective. The accumulation of episodes eventually creates a sense of repetition, as though every new hardship had to reaffirm a thesis the story had already established. Fidelity to the source material, far from functioning as an automatic virtue, becomes a limitation: Cavayé seems more interested in ensuring the presence of recognisable moments than in discovering what this story might say through contemporary cinema.

The scenes surrounding the 1832 uprising concentrate much of this difficulty. Where the story demands that social conflict acquire a collective dimension, the direction leans towards the conventional codes of spectacle, without finding an intensity capable of transcending the historical reconstruction. The scale of the production cannot compensate for the absence of a more distinctive formal perspective.

The issue also extends beyond the film itself. Its inclusion in the San Sebastián competition raises questions about the place of major commercially oriented productions within international film festivals today. Les Misérables is designed for broad circulation, built around a recognisable literary property and the familiar resources of a release intended for multiple markets. It belongs to the kind of product that platforms and distributors regularly offer, with new adaptations, historical reconstructions and period dramas arriving week after week.

A film’s place in a festival should not depend on its budget, industrial origins or commercial potential. The question is what its presence contributes to a programme that also seeks to discover other ways of making cinema. In this case, the answer is difficult to find. Hugo’s novel retains all of its power; this adaptation, by contrast, barely manages to justify its existence.