A loose adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Gavroche prominently features the novel’s political context and the opposition to the July Monarchy. One feels transported into the work of Honoré Daumier while looking at the posters caricaturing Louis Philippe the Bourgeois-King, known as ‘the pear’ among the people, or standing at the barricade on rue Saint-Denis in June 1832. Although the lavish sets were borrowed from Zori Parizha (Dawn of Paris), Grigori Roshal’s film about the Paris Commune, Tatyana Lukashevich was arguably better at giving them life, and she added a delightful evocation of the Place de la Bastille and its elephant (inhabited with all sort of little creatures, children and mice). The choice of Gavroche as the main character of Les Miserables contrasts with the previous French adaptations and can also be understood in the context of the Spanish Civil War. An embodiment of the lower class – poor, resourceful and heroic – an adolescent goes up on the barricades because his father was murdered in the King’s prison (this martyr of the Republic obviously has little in common with the novel’s Thénardier). Gavroche, like the child in Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People, which had probably inspired Hugo, becomes a revolutionary icon, represented on the screen by the young and unforgettable Nikolay Smorshkov (who would die on the front in 1943, aged 21). It’s a dynamic, lyrical and exciting adventure film that also benefits from the pioneering work that Margarita Barskaya had carried out with children. As in Rvanye bashmaki, touching scenes depict two generations, the protagonist and the five- or six-year-old children he takes under his protection. However, in the beautiful bakery scene, already included by Henri Fescourt in his epic 1925 adaptation, we can see that the little Parisian delinquent is now imbued with the Soviet morality: he no longer steals.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz