In November 2018 we chose a movie for you:

Les Misérables

Directed by: Tom Hopper
Starring: Hugh Jackamn, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter
Year: 2012
Running time: 158 minutes
Among the others awards, Anne Hathaway won the “Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress” (Oscar 2013). 

Plot: Les Misérables (2012) is a musical drama film, based on the French novel by Victor Hugo. Events take place in France during the early 19th century and the movie describes the stories of many characters, representing different social layers. The main characters are: Jean Valjean, released after 19 years of imprisonment for stealing bread; Javert, a police agent who dedicates his life to imprisoning Valjean once again; Fantine, a factory worker forced to prostitute herself after losing her job to support her daughter Cosette; Marius, a revolutionary student. In the movie these stories intertwine each other.

We chose this movie because we wanted to focus on two characters: Javert and Fantine.

Javert spends all his life trying to catch Jean Valjean and send him back to prison; he becomes slave of this condition and when he realizes Valjean is not only a thief but is also capable of pity (“Is he from heaven or from hell?”), understanding that he may have been wrong, he can not find a reason to live anymore.

Fantine fell in love with Tholomyes and from this relationship a children was born, Cosette; Tholomyes abandoned them so Fantine is forced to work to sustain Cosette. She is teased by her co-workers when they discover that she is a single mother and her foreman makes sexual provocations to her. The coworkers ask to fire her because they don’t want problems (“you must send the slut away, or we’re all gonna end in the gutter”) and the foreman, hurted from the secret, asks her to go on her way. The poor woman is therefore forced to prostitute herself and is mistreated and derided by men who abuse her for little money. She then no longer ate and drank anything but brandy to keep warm and not to think about his condition.

Fantine is the literary and cinematographic example of the abused women, deluded and then disappointed from men but also from other women, victim of the prejudice. Anne Hathaway, who played Fantine’s role and won the Oscar for it, said about the character: “I searched Fantine in a dark place in my heart. On the set I felt a great anger for what is done to her, the generous heart transformed into pure hatred in order to survive.(…) For a woman the condition was difficult even fifty years ago. I have also researched the present, there are many women in the world who sell their bodies to keep their children. It seems to me that this is the right historical moment to make the human condition really better“.

This is the reasons why we chose this character for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.  

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables_(2012_film)

“There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
(…) Then it all went wrong
I dreamed a dream in times gone by
(…) I dreamed, that love would never die
(…) But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame”