Les Miserables, Then and Now

Well, I suppose I might have known. I've seen this musical in the theaters and heard every movie and cast recording ever made - and then, just to lend respectability to my infatuation with the story, I even read Victor Hugo's volumous tome that started it all. It was like reading Le Morte D'Athur, only more "modern," I suppose. It was a beautiful story which naturally had to be greatly abridged when converted for the stage and set to lyrics. I loved the themes of redemption and of fighting for a cause even when you suspect you cannot win - just because it's the right thing to do. And seeing the movie was strange because after all these years I still know the lines word for word - and still it made me cry. I cried for different reasons, though. I cried because I could relate to the grittiness of the adult character's lives now, whereas before I cried at Eponine's unrequited love for Marius. I'm very good at unrequited love - quite the expert, in fact - to the point that I'm quite casual about it now. I can no longer shed a tear for my heart if it should be broken. I suppose unconsciously I may have been keeping it closed so that it could remain relatively whole for the time being, though there are still some chinks of light shining through the cracks. Gotta keep the lights on, just in case anyone needs to find their way home...

No, this time I cried because of that little girl lost in the woods and the mother who loved her so much that she allowed herself to be shamed and forgotten for the sake of what was best for her child. I cried because, much to my surprise, Anne Hathaway nailed the part of Fauntine so perfectly that I could see and feel the pain and the loss of innocence so sharply that I cried for my own. It doesn't help that young Cossette looked so very much like my own little girl. Fauntine found life not to be what she had expected when she lost Cosette's father and ended up working in that factory with those wretched women who didn't know good when they saw it. They mocked her and caused her to be fired, and she was left wondering what had gone so terribly wrong that she was alone and penniless, unable to help her child when the little girl needed her so much. Bit by bit, she gave everything she had for that child until there was nothing left of her. This is love in its purest form. Watching the grief and pain so raw and ugly in her face - it made her beautiful, but it tore me all up inside as if I were losing everything I had all over again though the music. I cried because still in this day and age a woman can give all she's got and work as hard as she can to overcome the shame and poverty to which she is born and still not be able to get past it. I cried because she sang with a certain heart-wrenching shame that still she dreamed that the man who had ruined her would come again and make things right. "There are dreams that cannot be" indeed, but still we can't help hoping for them.

In the end I love the musical because it shows life in its bitter reality and still the people hope and they sing of a better tomorrow. They piled upon that barricade and waved their flags like Occupy Wallstreet protesters, and failed far more miserably because they tried for so much more. But the entire point of the thing was that people's awareness may have been raised and that the people would one day rise up and live in freedom from tyranny. I don't know about politically, but personally I can continue to strive to do that very thing. One has to keep hope alive, for the sake of the children. Even when so much as sitting down to watch a fictitious musical can make you feel as if you are the child so lost in the woods.