"This man bears no more guilt than you "- said quite ironically in 1985 version (contrast to they are the guilty every one ?)

Probably the single clearest version of the confrontation

i re-watched les misérables 1982, but in the miniseries format it was released as in 1985. it’s split into 4 episodes, and there’s 40 extra minutes, most notably scenes near the beginning and the end. but it was missing scenes/shots i remember seeing in the theatrical version.

(this dvd has no subtitles but it does have an english dub, so i did watch that to make sure i understood everything. it’s pretty bad voice-acting wise, i would not recommend it.)

so the extra scenes in this version were 1) some scenes at the beginning with bishop myriel. first we see him reading at an execution, and there was a scene where he spoke to a local politician and they had a discussion about religion. it also adapted that scene from the book where he talks with a former revolutionary from the first republic.

it also had 2) the scene where thénardier tries to bargain with marius near the end. but if you’ve seen this movie you’ll know that it has a weird take on thénardier. they opted to make him more sympathetic overall and that carried through in this scene. it was framed visually as this parallel to the scene earlier where marius is arguing with gillenormand. i feel like it was almost supposed to be a criticism of how marius goes to live in comfort at the end of the story, by showing that he is in essence continuing his grandfather’s legacy.

there’s a lot of moments in this film where they take an event from the book, and they make it worse (either with the context or just ramping it up). i got the feeling a lot that this version was taking the book’s themes, and trying to say more. which is not bad, but a lot of the time the new stuff was so oblique and contradictory that i struggled to figure what it was saying. this could be a problem of editing as much as screenplay/direction.

i also had the feeling that a fair amount of what was included/emphasised in this version was a direct response or reference to the version of the musical that hossein directed. (some of the characterisations felt like opposites to the characterisations in the musical, it pointedly included things that the musical had left out, and some of the lines were references to lines from the original show .e.g. gavroche constantly singing the ‘c’est la faute à voltaire’ melody, courfeyrac and combeferre’s ‘juliet’ exchange versus the lines from ‘rogue et noir’)