Circumstances have continue to combine to delay my finishing the scene-by-scene breakdown I’ve been writing for four and a half years some time now of Combeferre in the 2012 film, and the direction Killian’s Combeferre took, but I do think I’m winding it down, and hell, maybe I will finally release it to the winds this summer, after I receive answers to a few last questions. In the meantime, I’m still pretty pleased by this, part of what I’d written re: Look Down (Paris):
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For how little we get to see of Combeferre in Look Down, what we do see is vital, and establishes him as very much earthbound among the Amis. We first meet him on the ground and in the crowd as Enjolras and Marius are speaking above them, and he's expressly and obviously not there to listen, but to encourage and to inform—unlike the majority of the Amis and extended Amis visible in this scene, he's never shown facing Enjolras and Marius in the position of listener; I can easily imagine he’s had a hand in writing whatever they’d planned to say, therefore he hardly needs to hear any of it—handing out their leaflets and moving among the people. Among them, but also clearly not of them; he's visibly distracted enough from his work of distributing the pamphlets by the woman singing Something’s gonna give, and briefly (so briefly, alas) attempts to make eye contact with her, though her justifiably angry attention is focused forward and very much not on him; by the time she offers an eyeblink’s worth of a look at him, Combeferre’s back at his work again. […] For many, many viewings I lost Combeferre in this scene once the guard arrived to shut down the rally; I thought the last we'd seen of him here was in the crowd again, reaching above it with more papers during Enjolras’ Where are the leaders of the land? Typically while watching the fleeting seconds when everything goes awry, my attention is always so much on Bahorel that I had entirely missed Combeferre right behind him as things get ugly, and then just behind Jamie Muscato’s unnamed student as the authorities on horseback crowd them. However, after searching for something else, I finally recognized him in the melee with the angrier others.
In the first moment, Combeferre still waves his pamphlets, albeit furiously; in the next shot he’s raised his gun. An important little moment, I think, and easy to miss, but fascinating to me, as he appears to be the only one of the Amis visibly armed at this protest, with words and weapon. Having seen this behind the scenes moment, I knew Killian’s Combeferre was indeed carrying a gun for the filming of this scene, but the brief flash of that gun in what made the cut of the scene was fantastic to see. I’ve called film!Combeferre's philosophy when in doubt, apply reason, compassion, then gunfire, and this scene works in all three of these things; compassion has had its moment already in Combeferre’s attempt to connect with those in the crowd; now with first his papers raised and then his gun, reason and gunfire are at the ready.
