Anyone who grew up on the 1996 Disney version, with its wisecracking gargoyles, should brace themselves. Netflix has released the trailer for The Hunchback, Soul of Paris, a French reimagining of Victor Hugo’s story in which the nearest thing to a jolly musical number is an outbreak of cholera.
This isn’t a straight adaptation of the 1831 novel, which was set back in 1482. Jean-François Richet’s film moves the action to Paris in 1830, on the eve of the July Revolution, with cholera threatening the city (the real epidemic didn’t arrive until 1832, but historical films have never let a calendar get in the way of a good plague). Vincent Cassel, close to unrecognisable under the make-up and the hump, plays a stone carver thought to be a monster, hunted by the police and wanted by a doctor who would very much like to experiment on him. Benjamin Voisin is that doctor, Karim Leklou is the security chief on the hunchback’s trail, and Daphné Patakia plays Agnès, who to all appearances is this film’s answer to Esmeralda. The trailer, released on 30 October, sells it as a chase thriller with a doomed love affair at its heart, which, in fairness to Hugo, isn’t a million miles from what he was up to.
The premise borrows from a theory floated by British archivist Adrian Glew, who suggested that Hugo’s bell-ringer may have been inspired by a real hunchbacked stone carver working in Paris. Richet has been careful to say that the film starts from a credible premise rather than a true story, which is the polite French way of saying “please don’t write in.”
Richet and Cassel go back a long way, having made the two-part gangster epic Mesrine together, and Richet has since done tough-guy duty in Hollywood with Blood Father and Plane. All of which suggests this version will be more interested in pursuit, mud and violence than in bells. Éric Besnard and Edgar Marie wrote the script, it runs 1 hour 43 minutes, it carries a TV-MA rating and a reported €30 million budget, and it lands on Netflix worldwide on 27 November.
The hunchback has long been one of cinema’s great sympathetic monsters, from Lon Chaney’s 1923 silent for Universal to Charles Laughton’s magnificent turn in 1939, and this take leans back towards the gothic rather than the cartoon. Whether it has anything new to say about the man behind the face is the real question. On the premise alone, it at least understands that the true monsters in this sort of story are always the ones carrying the paperwork.
If the embed above stops working, the trailer is on YouTube here: The Hunchback, Soul of Paris trailer (Netflix).
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