Despite the film becoming a minor sensation on release, Kassovitz’s message fell on deaf ears. The characters of La Haine don’t feel French, so they must try to carve out their own identities as best as they can.įrance centres itself around the ideals of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, and fraternity), yet restricts which citizens can live under its banner. Meanwhile, he borrows a zoom effect made famous by Hitchcock’s Vertigo and sets his film over the course of a single day, inviting comparisons to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. His use of black and white, combined with such experimental camera work, evokes the greatest of French exports – the New Wave films of the Fifties and Sixties, by figures such as Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda. It features a cameo by DJ Cut Killer, who plays a mash-up of NTM’s “Nique la Police” (“F**k the Police”) and Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je ne regrette rien”. La Haine’s most famous sequence sees the camera hop out of a bedroom window and glide over the banlieue itself, both as an angel and an ominous portent.
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Vinz acts out De Niro’s Taxi Driver monologue in the mirror. They have an affinity for hip-hop, break-dancing, and sportswear brands like Nike and Reebok. Instead, these men seek resistance through the appropriation of American, frequently black American, culture. But there’s a terrible truth at the centre of all this: to abandon those parts of their identity that are still their own, to a country that values nothing about them, would render them completely invisible. Vinz, Said and Hubert are constantly watched over by the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, painted in Orwellian style on the sides of their housing blocks. Take, for example, its long and shameful history of legislating against veils and burqas. This is a nation that upholds its own culture with a kind of religious fervour, expecting all those who land on its shores to abandon their pasts and their values in favour of total assimilation.
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All their misadventures amount to is a series of denials they’re kicked out of the gallery, fail to secure the money, and miss their train home. The men scurry through the darkness, rendered as a shadowy maze of doorways and dead ends. While Kassovitz shoots the bare concrete of the banlieues with a kind of bleak-humoured familiarity, Paris is captured in a blind panic. Every moment they spend in the city, they’re treated as outsiders. The incident takes place in Paris, an hour-long train ride away from their banlieue, where Said is looking to cash in on a drug deal.
Officers brutalise the two men, while they posture like Dirty Harry in front of a nervous young recruit.įor the most part, however, all three are bound together as products of the “malaise of the ghetto” – as they’re so dismissively called by the owner of the art gallery they sneak into.
It’s Said who’s targeted when things kick off at the hospital and it’s he, alongside Hubert, who ends up in custody while Vinz manages to slink away. He’s the only one who actually took part in the riots, but his neighbour still blames Said. Vinz’s provocative nature might itself betray a certain level of privilege. Kassovitz’s focus is on class, not race, but the differences between these men are still crucial: Said is also a beur, Vinz is eastern European-Jewish, and Hubert is Afro-French. Kassovitz has described his leads as “the good, the bad, and the naive”: Hubert dreams of escape, Vinz desires only vengeance and Saïd does his best to stay ignorant – the film opens and closes on his eyes, shut tight. His friends, Said (Said Taghmaoui) and Hubert (Hubert Koundé), are mortified when he reveals his plans to use it against the cops if Abdel dies in hospital. After a night of riots sparked by the beating of a young “beur” (French slang for a second-generation north African) named Abdel, Vinz (Vincent Cassel) stumbles across a policeman’s handgun. La Haine follows three men from “les banlieues” over the span of roughly 20 hours, with the time tracked through a series of intertitles.
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