BBC "Les Misérables"
28 January 2019 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've been trying to identify just why I find the current Andrew Davies adaptation for "Les Misérables" so unsatisfying, which is hard to put into words without coming across as just another 'oh no, he dared to alter one word of the Sacred Text' rant. Save that it happens to be several years since I reread the book (for the purposes of writing my AU-Cosette story), and what I'm getting are feelings of general wrongness which turn out to be corroborated when I do go to look up the relevant sections of the novel, but are not the sort of verbatim recall that can identify every little deviation.
See, I do know about adaptation. I understand perfectly well that you can't reproduce even something as short as the first Harry Potter book on screen in every detail exact as it was printed (and in fact, those films might have been better films if they'd been a bit less constrained by the anticipated expectations of millions of screaming fans). Putting a novel on screen is a question of conveying the spirit of the story, not every incident, and that often involves writing new scenes between the characters or else streamlining bits of the plot because internal agonising doesn't come over well on screen (or simply to shorten it).
But what I'm getting from this adaptation is the sense of a writer who thinks he is taking the chance to improve on the perceived deficiencies of the original. I may be unduly influenced by a very smug interview with Andrew Davies that was printed at the start of the year (in which he explained that it made no sense at all that Javert hadn't recognised the bearded, savage convict Valjean at sight in the person of the respected factory-owning mayor of Montreuil, and therefore he had rewritten the characters accordingly -- and that he felt most of the principal characters were weirdly lacking in sexual activity, and that M. Gillenormand's household was a nasty fascist environment)... but I think it's evident from the production itself.
Gratuitous black casting -- this doesn't come across as 'reflecting the true diversity of 19th-century Paris'. It comes across as an exercise in box-ticking and a conscious attempt at selling into the 'young urban' (e.g. black/mixed race) market, plus an implied criticism of Hugo the egalitarian for failing to include any 'diverse' characters in his cast. If he was so keen on the rights of the oppressed then why didn't he worry about racial oppression? Well, Davies will remedy that...
Hugo comes across as having sympathy for all his characters, even the cringing and manipulative Thénardier -- he doesn't approve of him, but he doesn't sneer at him. Hugo's Gillenormand, for example, is depicted as a sprightly old rogue of the ancien régime, out of tune with the strait-laced modern era and indignant at the wanton vandals who called themselves revolutionaries and pulled down the world of his rose-tinted memories about his ears while dragging France through a war that shattered the continent, but affectionate and good-hearted. Davies' Gillenormand is, well, a nasty fascist. (Hard to imagine him paying for the bastard children of his maidservant with a flattered chuckle when she attempts to pass them off as his...)
Davies' Javert is a maniac with a violent personal vendetta against Valjean, who arrives in Montreuil with the specific aim of bringing the mayor down and tells him so to his face -- in the most recent episode he is actually shown as neglecting his duty in order to go off and hunt Valjean despite a city-wide revolt. Hugo's Javert (and I went back to check this, because I simply couldn't match what I saw on screen with my impressions of the character in the novel) is a man driven by correctness and scruple to such an extent that he fails to arrest Valjean in Paris when he has the opportunity, because he doesn't have absolute proof of his identity. He is a man who completely forgets Valjean's existence after his promotion to the Paris police because he has much bigger fish to fry (or as Hugo puts it, "à ces chiens toujours en chasse, le loup d'aujourd'hui fait oublier le loup d'hier".) He is a man who begs Valjean in his character of mayor to dismiss him dishonourably from the force for his own perceived fault. He doesn't chase his target for years under the obviously unreasonable (as depicted for our benefit by the writer) pretence that he once stole a coin from a vagrant; we are told that he goes after him, after Valjean's suspicious activities in Paris have initially been brought to his attention without any knowledge of the suspect's identity, because Authority (for which he has an unreasoning respect) has classified the man as 'highly dangerous' (classé à jamais parmi les malfaiteurs de l’espèce la plus dangereuse), and because such a capture would be a magnificent achievement which his senior colleagues would dearly like to have for themselves. In other words, he is behaving in an entirely rational and professional way.
(Oh, and in the novel he certainly does not threaten to break down the door of a convent full of secluded nuns under the claim that they are lying to him...)
I would go so far as to say that the whole point of the character of Victor Hugo's Javert is to show that following the letter of the law, being rigidly just and avoiding personal temptation are not the same thing as being a truly 'good' man; Javert is, in many respects, entirely admirable (and is written with human sympathy by Hugo, who comments, with regard to his failure to ensnare Valjean, that even the best strategists occasionally make mistakes and no-one is perfect). Valjean, who has sinned and repented and learned to forgive himself and others, is more saintly than Javert, who has never sinned and holds the world to his own implacable standards, and when Javert gets an inkling of this possibility it utterly destroys him.
Davies' Javert is simply a pantomime baddie (as one old lady of my acquaintance commented, "I can't stand him, but then you're not supposed to, are you?")
Davies doesn't seem to have much time for Marius either -- I think this is the first adaptation I've seen that depicts the character the way fan-fiction likes to bash him. And ironically for an adaptation that makes a big thing of how it's showing the 'real' story and not the one you think you know from the musical, his compressed version of the Marius/Cosette romance really doesn't work, while the musical manages to get away with it admirably. With the help of the emotions carried in music and the conventions of operatic compression, it's possible to make the overnight reunion and passionate parting of two young innocents into a convincing life-changing experience. Shorn of Marius's months of longing and dreaming, of the two young lovers' unspoken romance in the Luxembourg, their weeks of innocent encounters and complete ecstasy in the hidden garden, it's hard to feel any emotional commitment to their meeting and then almost immediate separation. Marius's declaration that he wants to die is almost risible in this context, and Cosette appears to be motivated largely by teenage rebellion.
I'm assuming that Davies is trying to give Cosette some 'backbone', as fanfic authors so often claim they are aiming to do, by depicting her as constantly complaining that her father is 'imprisoning' her and having her flounce around, pout, and defy him. Presumably sweet-natured 19th-century heroines just aren't considered liberated enough for a modern audience. But I think his sympathies simply lie with Éponine -- again, the blatant Éponine/Marius shipping is far more developed than the pretty superficial gesture at a Marius/Cosette romance (because plot, basically), and reminds me of fanfic. I basically got the impression that the author sees Marius as a fool for not appreciating Éponine in all her complexity and oppressed-ness and in going for the superficial spoilt Cosette whom he barely knows.
We can sit back and wait for all the fan-fiction interpretations of the wasted moment when Marius tells Éponine he'll give her anything she wants and she refrains from asking him for the night in his bed she'd obviously dearly like to have...
(Incidentally, I'm no expert on 1840s fashion, but it seems wrong to me that Cosette keeps running around with her hair loose down her back -- if she is old enough to aspire to fashionable dresses and to want to attract young men, shouldn't she also aspire to put her hair up like a normal adult woman?
La rose s'aperçoit qu'elle est une machine de guerre -- Cosette looks in the mirror)
Other gratuitous reversals: rather than having Cosette routinely accompany Valjean in his early-morning walks out of affection, and having him horrified when they stumble across the chain-gang (with all its memories of the past), Davies has Valjean tyrannically forbid Cosette ever to go out, then organise a special expedition to show her the chain-gang. Again, one gets the impression that Davies feels that Hugo's motivations and relationships are unconvincing and that the book relies far too much on coincidence, which he can improve upon.
What I liked about the adaptation: its handling of Fantine's life in Paris and her relationship with Favourite and the other grisettes (and of what the grisettes were; not prostitutes, but working-class girls taking lovers to brighten their lives), and with Tholomyès and the other students. These scenes are a perfect example of sympathetic expansion on the original material, and vividly depict the atmosphere of that section of the book and of the infamous 'surprise'; it's almost never included in any adaptation, but here the writer's heart really seems to be in it.
He subsequently decides to go round shipping Fantine with Valjean (fan-fic ahoy!), but one can't have everything.
Well, I keep watching it, so I must be sort of enjoying it, right?
I suppose so... The next episode is supposedly the last, so Davies must be planning to squeeze an awful lot in -- presumably compressing the timeline enormously, unless he's going to do a lot of skips. I really don't see how Javert's epiphany is going to work out, given this version of the character and the difficulties of showing internal agonies onscreen anyhow. Again, the musical manages to get away with it by reprising an earlier number (Javert's soliloquy about how "those who falter and those who fall must pay the price") with its subliminal associations; now it is he who has faltered and begun to doubt, "who never doubted all these years", and must pay the self-imposed penalty. Operatic convention allows for a big solo addressing the audience, after all.
Davies' approach definitely doesn't allow for any such approach and his version of the character has given no signs of introspection, idealism, or a neurotic devotion to duty, so I can only assume he's going to drown himself in some kind of perverted rejection-snit because he realises that he has secretly been in love with Valjean all along (seriously. It's that kind of 'daring' adaptation).
Sigh.
Edit: an entertaining rundown of the original novel (not quite as long as the original, but in a reasonably accurate spirit): Dak reads Les Misérables
See, I do know about adaptation. I understand perfectly well that you can't reproduce even something as short as the first Harry Potter book on screen in every detail exact as it was printed (and in fact, those films might have been better films if they'd been a bit less constrained by the anticipated expectations of millions of screaming fans). Putting a novel on screen is a question of conveying the spirit of the story, not every incident, and that often involves writing new scenes between the characters or else streamlining bits of the plot because internal agonising doesn't come over well on screen (or simply to shorten it).
But what I'm getting from this adaptation is the sense of a writer who thinks he is taking the chance to improve on the perceived deficiencies of the original. I may be unduly influenced by a very smug interview with Andrew Davies that was printed at the start of the year (in which he explained that it made no sense at all that Javert hadn't recognised the bearded, savage convict Valjean at sight in the person of the respected factory-owning mayor of Montreuil, and therefore he had rewritten the characters accordingly -- and that he felt most of the principal characters were weirdly lacking in sexual activity, and that M. Gillenormand's household was a nasty fascist environment)... but I think it's evident from the production itself.
Gratuitous black casting -- this doesn't come across as 'reflecting the true diversity of 19th-century Paris'. It comes across as an exercise in box-ticking and a conscious attempt at selling into the 'young urban' (e.g. black/mixed race) market, plus an implied criticism of Hugo the egalitarian for failing to include any 'diverse' characters in his cast. If he was so keen on the rights of the oppressed then why didn't he worry about racial oppression? Well, Davies will remedy that...
Hugo comes across as having sympathy for all his characters, even the cringing and manipulative Thénardier -- he doesn't approve of him, but he doesn't sneer at him. Hugo's Gillenormand, for example, is depicted as a sprightly old rogue of the ancien régime, out of tune with the strait-laced modern era and indignant at the wanton vandals who called themselves revolutionaries and pulled down the world of his rose-tinted memories about his ears while dragging France through a war that shattered the continent, but affectionate and good-hearted. Davies' Gillenormand is, well, a nasty fascist. (Hard to imagine him paying for the bastard children of his maidservant with a flattered chuckle when she attempts to pass them off as his...)
Davies' Javert is a maniac with a violent personal vendetta against Valjean, who arrives in Montreuil with the specific aim of bringing the mayor down and tells him so to his face -- in the most recent episode he is actually shown as neglecting his duty in order to go off and hunt Valjean despite a city-wide revolt. Hugo's Javert (and I went back to check this, because I simply couldn't match what I saw on screen with my impressions of the character in the novel) is a man driven by correctness and scruple to such an extent that he fails to arrest Valjean in Paris when he has the opportunity, because he doesn't have absolute proof of his identity. He is a man who completely forgets Valjean's existence after his promotion to the Paris police because he has much bigger fish to fry (or as Hugo puts it, "à ces chiens toujours en chasse, le loup d'aujourd'hui fait oublier le loup d'hier".) He is a man who begs Valjean in his character of mayor to dismiss him dishonourably from the force for his own perceived fault. He doesn't chase his target for years under the obviously unreasonable (as depicted for our benefit by the writer) pretence that he once stole a coin from a vagrant; we are told that he goes after him, after Valjean's suspicious activities in Paris have initially been brought to his attention without any knowledge of the suspect's identity, because Authority (for which he has an unreasoning respect) has classified the man as 'highly dangerous' (classé à jamais parmi les malfaiteurs de l’espèce la plus dangereuse), and because such a capture would be a magnificent achievement which his senior colleagues would dearly like to have for themselves. In other words, he is behaving in an entirely rational and professional way.
(Oh, and in the novel he certainly does not threaten to break down the door of a convent full of secluded nuns under the claim that they are lying to him...)
I would go so far as to say that the whole point of the character of Victor Hugo's Javert is to show that following the letter of the law, being rigidly just and avoiding personal temptation are not the same thing as being a truly 'good' man; Javert is, in many respects, entirely admirable (and is written with human sympathy by Hugo, who comments, with regard to his failure to ensnare Valjean, that even the best strategists occasionally make mistakes and no-one is perfect). Valjean, who has sinned and repented and learned to forgive himself and others, is more saintly than Javert, who has never sinned and holds the world to his own implacable standards, and when Javert gets an inkling of this possibility it utterly destroys him.
Davies' Javert is simply a pantomime baddie (as one old lady of my acquaintance commented, "I can't stand him, but then you're not supposed to, are you?")
Davies doesn't seem to have much time for Marius either -- I think this is the first adaptation I've seen that depicts the character the way fan-fiction likes to bash him. And ironically for an adaptation that makes a big thing of how it's showing the 'real' story and not the one you think you know from the musical, his compressed version of the Marius/Cosette romance really doesn't work, while the musical manages to get away with it admirably. With the help of the emotions carried in music and the conventions of operatic compression, it's possible to make the overnight reunion and passionate parting of two young innocents into a convincing life-changing experience. Shorn of Marius's months of longing and dreaming, of the two young lovers' unspoken romance in the Luxembourg, their weeks of innocent encounters and complete ecstasy in the hidden garden, it's hard to feel any emotional commitment to their meeting and then almost immediate separation. Marius's declaration that he wants to die is almost risible in this context, and Cosette appears to be motivated largely by teenage rebellion.
I'm assuming that Davies is trying to give Cosette some 'backbone', as fanfic authors so often claim they are aiming to do, by depicting her as constantly complaining that her father is 'imprisoning' her and having her flounce around, pout, and defy him. Presumably sweet-natured 19th-century heroines just aren't considered liberated enough for a modern audience. But I think his sympathies simply lie with Éponine -- again, the blatant Éponine/Marius shipping is far more developed than the pretty superficial gesture at a Marius/Cosette romance (because plot, basically), and reminds me of fanfic. I basically got the impression that the author sees Marius as a fool for not appreciating Éponine in all her complexity and oppressed-ness and in going for the superficial spoilt Cosette whom he barely knows.
We can sit back and wait for all the fan-fiction interpretations of the wasted moment when Marius tells Éponine he'll give her anything she wants and she refrains from asking him for the night in his bed she'd obviously dearly like to have...
(Incidentally, I'm no expert on 1840s fashion, but it seems wrong to me that Cosette keeps running around with her hair loose down her back -- if she is old enough to aspire to fashionable dresses and to want to attract young men, shouldn't she also aspire to put her hair up like a normal adult woman?
La rose s'aperçoit qu'elle est une machine de guerre -- Cosette looks in the mirror)
Other gratuitous reversals: rather than having Cosette routinely accompany Valjean in his early-morning walks out of affection, and having him horrified when they stumble across the chain-gang (with all its memories of the past), Davies has Valjean tyrannically forbid Cosette ever to go out, then organise a special expedition to show her the chain-gang. Again, one gets the impression that Davies feels that Hugo's motivations and relationships are unconvincing and that the book relies far too much on coincidence, which he can improve upon.
What I liked about the adaptation: its handling of Fantine's life in Paris and her relationship with Favourite and the other grisettes (and of what the grisettes were; not prostitutes, but working-class girls taking lovers to brighten their lives), and with Tholomyès and the other students. These scenes are a perfect example of sympathetic expansion on the original material, and vividly depict the atmosphere of that section of the book and of the infamous 'surprise'; it's almost never included in any adaptation, but here the writer's heart really seems to be in it.
He subsequently decides to go round shipping Fantine with Valjean (fan-fic ahoy!), but one can't have everything.
Well, I keep watching it, so I must be sort of enjoying it, right?
I suppose so... The next episode is supposedly the last, so Davies must be planning to squeeze an awful lot in -- presumably compressing the timeline enormously, unless he's going to do a lot of skips. I really don't see how Javert's epiphany is going to work out, given this version of the character and the difficulties of showing internal agonies onscreen anyhow. Again, the musical manages to get away with it by reprising an earlier number (Javert's soliloquy about how "those who falter and those who fall must pay the price") with its subliminal associations; now it is he who has faltered and begun to doubt, "who never doubted all these years", and must pay the self-imposed penalty. Operatic convention allows for a big solo addressing the audience, after all.
Davies' approach definitely doesn't allow for any such approach and his version of the character has given no signs of introspection, idealism, or a neurotic devotion to duty, so I can only assume he's going to drown himself in some kind of perverted rejection-snit because he realises that he has secretly been in love with Valjean all along (seriously. It's that kind of 'daring' adaptation).
Sigh.
Edit: an entertaining rundown of the original novel (not quite as long as the original, but in a reasonably accurate spirit): Dak reads Les Misérables
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no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 09:53 am (UTC)I've been a bit dubious about Davies ever since I realised that "he felt most of the principal characters were weirdly lacking in sexual activity" is a statement that applies to all his adaptations from classical literature, but I don't think I could put up with 6 episodes of somebody getting Javert that badly wrong.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 11:38 am (UTC)The problem for an adaptation is that it requires Javert as the dogged pursuer to drive the plot, and Hugo does rely a lot on coincidence where all the characters are concerned. It's easier just to make Javert actively chase Valjean, rather than have their paths keep crossing while the police agent is in pursuit of his duty elsewhere, which requires impractical amounts of explanation.
But that is not the same thing as having Javert snarling and raving and connecting every little thing from Thenardier's escape from prison to Enjolras' insurrection back to the idea of 'getting' Valjean, with the rest of the police regarding him as off his rocker on the subject.
And apparently not connecting this back to his being a black officer in command of white men (Othello-style); I can swallow a black Porthos from the Court of Miracles in the 1700s in place of Dumas' lethargic Baron du Vallon, I can swallow Constable Nightingale as a black 'peeler' on Sir Robert's newly-minted force, but both of them get decent origins stories and have to suffer being looked at askance on occasion by their contemporaries. The only character whose 'blackening' felt natural here is that of the housekeeper Toussaint, who becomes a turbaned Mammy-style figure...
Incidentally, in fairness I should also add that the confrontation between Marius and his grandfather in the most recent episode was well done, with the old man being presented as a nuanced human being for the first time and Marius getting to deliver the ringing line about how 'at our last meeting you insulted my father and now you insult my future wife'... pity he's depicted as such an incompetent idiot (insulted and despised even by Enjolras, and totally useless when the Thenardiers are torturing Valjean) elsewhere.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 12:40 am (UTC)(a) giving him a loyal sidekick to whom he can confide his thoughts, although "Is everything all right, sir?"/"No, everything is not all right" isn't the most stirring of introductions, and the speech that follows didn't really strike me as explaining anything. I liked the way that they included the fact that his 'suicide note' in canon consists of a list of recommendations for improving police work, although so far as I recall they changed the actual content of the list to make it all for the benefit of improving prisoners' conditions (to ram home the idea that Javert has Seen the Error of his Ways) rather than the oddly-assorted collection of trivia from canon.
(b) having him comment on the way that Valjean was for some reason fondling Marius's head in the cab by hinting that the young man must be Valjean's "special friend" (or a similar euphemism), and having him totally flabbergasted when Valjean returned that he didn't know Marius at all and would in fact suffer by his survival, if he should live. Although I would have thought that concluding that Valjean must be out of his mind (as Javert in fact replies at the time) was a rather more likely outcome than concluding that Valjean was a saint and that he should kill himself...
The Seine under the bridge is remarkably flat and placid, contrary to Hugo's description :-p
Valjean's death makes no sense in this version :-(
First of all they've presented him as much younger than in the book (where we are told that he is in fact eighty, but appears a hale and hearty sixty until he loses Cosette); then they've cut out the whole business of his slow decline and gradual self-excisement from Cosette's life -- doubtless because it would be hard to show and occupy a lot of screen-time -- and had him run off to Digne to tend the Bishop's garden instead, where Cosette tracks him down six weeks later. (Surely the Bishop isn't still alive? What does the current incumbent make of this?)
So instead of being reunited with Valjean in his own home on his deathbed, she finds him outdoors busy digging in the garden... whereupon he announces that he is dying. After a gap of only six weeks, and with no reason given.
(You could theorise that he had been suffering from some long-standing condition which he had hitherto taken care to conceal from Cosette, but that certainly isn't stated.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-23 05:28 pm (UTC)To be honest, I don't mind adaptations of a book who aren't 100% faithful to the original - but you know, as you said yourself, the key is that you have to either want to "improve" the text (i.e. fix a few Values Dissonances or plot holes, or give an Ensemble Darkhorse more to do), either want to fit the source material to a certain format. If you're going to adapt Lord of the Rings into a film trilogy, for instance, some segments will have to go since the books are pretty huge.
Problem with Andrew Davies is that it almost feels like he's smug towards the source material itself, which, quite frankly, is not a good starting point. He doesn't like the musical? Fair enough (even though it's hilarious that the whole atmosphere is uncannily similar to the 2012 film). The whole thing about how the characters were "not sexual enough" was utterly bizarre, though (and I won't lie that I was VERY afraid of what it'd imply for characters like Fantine or Eponine). There is some added sexual material in some other adaptations of his - Northanger Abbey and War and Peace come to mind - but they didn't feel out of place either?
To be fair, there were quite a few people of color in big cities like London or Paris back in the 19th century, but it's like most period dramas who try to incorporate some... don't do it very well either (one exception I can think of on top of my head that does it well is Harlots)?
And coming from someone who LOVES David Oyolewo (it's a REAL shame he didn't have better material to work with), it makes me laugh though that Javert was actually Romani in the original novel - therefore not white. But I guess he wasn't dark enough to Davies' taste, and he also didn't realize the VERY unfortunate implications of making Thénardier black...
If anything, making Fantine black would have made more sense and would seem a tad more cautious when it comes to unfortunate implications - she's described as blonde in the book, but while I love Lily Collins, she's a brunette!
And yes, Gillenormand is by no means nice in the original novel, but he's very human, changes through the course of the story, genuinely loves Marius and comes to like Cosette as well - and that's what makes Victor Hugo's work so great, in the sense that while some characters are horrible, they're still human - again, remember the rule that you need to improve things if you're going to change them, and not flatten it?
The whole point of Cosette is that she's Spoiled Sweet: yes, she's a Daddy's Girl, but Valjean has clearly raised her to be kind and generous to people around her, and she even extends that to her own father. In the "godforsaken" musical, yes, there is a side of her that wants to "go outside", learn about herself, about the outside world, and she does feel like she's very sheltered by Valjean, too much, even, but she never comes off as bitter about it either? She's very much a dutiful daughter in all aspects (which would be expected of a 19th century heroine), all the while remaining a Spirited Young Lady. It's a hard thread to follow today, but making her the typical Rebellious Teen isn't really the way to go...
Fantine's hairstyles aren't historically accurate either - I don't understand for the life of me why she goes around with half her head down and the rest pulled up in a really weird huge bun. It almost looked like a 60s beehive - NOT GOOD. Especially that bringing your hair up was an element of pride for young girls, since it symbolized they were women now - Cosette being a bit vain (but of course, in a way that is silly and endearing more than anything else), she would definitely make a point of pining her hair up...
Also, I'm a Fantine/Valjean shipper and I feel very guilty right now XD
no subject
Date: 2019-05-29 05:30 pm (UTC)To be fair, I think a lot of it can be filed under the heading of trying to reduce the amount of pure coincidence that plays a part in the novel -- the trouble is the tin ear of the 'fixer' in question for the effect these changes have on the characters themselves. Having Javert, who is constrained by his sense of duty to an almost restrictive level, actively neglect his duty because of an invented personal vendetta is just wrong. Wrong about the character, and a thing that is wrong to do.
I've always been pretty sceptical about the 'Javert was a gypsy' dictum in fan-fiction, since it seems to be fuelled by a desire to see him as an oppressed minority; so far as I recall, the whole edifice (which appears nowhere in the book: Javert never meets gypsies, never speaks of them, and is never compared to one favourably or adversely in appearance or habits, either by the narrator or anyone he encounters in the course of the novel) is erected upon a single sentence, the one saying that his mother was 'a bohemian', which in the context of his being born inside a jail is equally likely to imply that she was simply a vagabond. (Nobody has ever suggested that the protagonists of La Bohème, or its source material, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, were intended to be either Czechs or gypsies.)
If Hugo as a nineteenth-century author had really intended one of his characters to be a gypsy, then I think he would have stuck a few stereotypes in, I'm afraid. Dark eyes and hair, swarthy complexion, second sight, an earring or two, an affinity for animals -- it's not the sort of idea you would have dropped into a random half-sentence without any point to make by it.
If you'd asked me whether Fantine was blonde or brunette I think I'd have said blonde, but I certainly didn't notice the hair colour of the actress in this version at all ;-)
(And I don't really know enough about the hair styles of the period to tell whether something is accurate or not; just enough to know that up until the 1920s when short hair first became an option, putting up your hair was a marker of adulthood, and that adult women with full-length hair didn't run around with flowing locks over their shoulders... as a matter of practicality as much as anything else, I imagine.)
I don't remember Cosette in the book ever being resentful or rebellious on her own behalf -- certainly not the stroppy teenager we see on TV, although that was presumably supposed to make her more 'representative' of the viewing audience -- but one significant element Davies actively chose to suppress was the fact that Valjean basically sets her up as a princess in the house on the rue Plumet, while insisting on living like a servant himself in the outbuildings. And that Cosette quite deliberately and consciously foiled his attempt by insisting on 'visiting' him so often that he was obliged to heat his quarters and serve proper food for her benefit. She was not stupid, she was not rebelling, but she got her own way -- and she did so not for her own benefit, but for the sake of others.
That's Book-Cosette. That's the epitome of a young lady of both spirit and essential goodness, as held up to the reader by a 19th-century author. And it's ironic that a 21st-century adaptor prefers to suppress her actively powerful qualities and make her into a petulant child.