User Reviews

"Claude Gueux", a short novel by Victor Hugo, written in 1834, long before "Les Misérables" and much less known than this mythical work, appears as an early testimony to the author's social concerns. In this book he already shows what will be his trademark, namely a strong empathy for those who are reduced to poverty by an unjust and unequal society. "Claude Gueux" also militates, in the same way as "The Last Day of a Condemned Man" did in 1829, against the horror of capital punishment, another lifetime's combat for its author. The story concerns a man named Gueux (a French term for beggar), a good cabinetmaker, a loving husband and father who, being unable to find a job, gives in to temptation one day: he picks up on the ground the full purse of a bourgeois who has just lost it, which allows him to offer his two loved ones a little good food, warmth and comfort for one evening. He also pays cash his back rent, which unfortunately betrays him. As a matter of fact, his owner, intrigued by his sudden wealth, denounces him to the Maréchaussée. That is how, only too happy to have found a "culprit", society ruthlessly closes its trap on the poor man and, as an indirect result, on his wife and kid, who will then go down the slippery slope of rejection and despair. In his film adaptation for the quality series "Au Siècle de Maupassant", Olivier Schatzky succeeds in doing justice to Hugo's text by intelligently avoiding two pitfalls that such a project can present: an approach that is too demonstrative or too melodramatic, or even worse... both. What actually makes this TV movie particularly watchable is undoubtedly its remarkable sobriety. No slogans or moralizing speeches to begin with, only human feelings. Mostly there is no artifice in "Claude Gueux", only natural settings without unnecessary aesthetic but also without exaggerated misery, devoid of strong effects, performed by actors who do not ham it up. At the head of the cast, Samuel Le Bihan is in character the entire running time, never failing to capture the dignity that emerges from his character. Faced with him, in the ungrateful role of Mr. Delacelle, Thomas Chabrol deftly shows the same restraint, but this time in the expression of the implacable prison director's perverse sadism. A last (laudable) mark of sobriety on Schatzky's part is his choice not to show the final execution. The director works in the field of humanism, not of Grand-Guignol. An excellent television film not to be missed. Illustrating Hugo's rhetoric with relevance, it is not only honest and committed but touching as well. It can, if you are a fan of contemporary music, be complemented by the vision and/or the listening of the eponymous opera by Robert Badinter (libretto) and Thierry Escaich (composer), very interesting as well but, it goes without saying, in a very different style.