La haine

10/10  - Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz - 1995 - 98 minutes

It’s difficult to feel confident in your critique of a film made in a language you can’t understand about a topic completely out of your depth, and yet in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, I am fairly certain that it is my favorite movie ever made. Kassovitz and his collaborators created that elusive film that manages to balance its beautiful and entertaining qualities with deeply serious and bleak elements; in essence, La Haine or its translated title Hate is a grim and blatantly political tale told in perfect form. 

Visually the film is a great success, and easily contains some of my favorite cinematography ever filmed. The post production switch to black and white was a very necessary choice; this color palette is much more suited to capture the grit and edge of the world in which the main characters live. La Haine excels most in its camera work and framing, even beyond the famous dolly zoom as the boys arrive in Paris and the legendary mirror shot of Vincent Cassel. Besides these moments, the shots are grounded, highlighting the disorganization and systemic issues surrounding the central story and placing the viewer directly in the chaos of the film's world. 

The film, starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde and Saïd Taghmaoui as three teenagers living in the projects outside of Paris, is a meditation on the eruption of violence that occurs when social tensions have been left to grow unchecked. La Haine portrays these three teenagers, one Black, one Arab and one Jewish, in a “day in the life” style following a violent riot the night before that culminated in the brutal beating of an acquaintance, Abdel, at the hands of police officers. By the time of the film's events, Cassel’s particularly hotheaded and incendiary character Vinz has collected a revolver dropped by an officer during the riot. The boys go about their day in typical fashion but their experiences become more and more shaped by the inequality of their environment and their lives seem destined to take a violent turn. 

The story is so immersive because the characters are explicitly and uncomfortably real. Vinz, Saïd and Hubert live in an environment that has imported American pop culture and in many ways their portrayal is made for adolescents across the world. Their banter, often full of insults and slurs, their periodic drug use, materialism and general ambivalence are a bleak but wholly sincere reflection of the lives of innumerable teenagers. And for those marginalized by the law and society, subject to brutality and discriminatory violence and essentially unable to improve their situation, their attitudes towards life are not without reason. The kids are the central plot device of the movie; their stories are a sharp criticism of France’s systemic racism, tension between affluent and marginalized communities and most obviously the police brutality within the disadvantaged banlieues, or “suburbs,” where the death of several teenagers inspired Kassovitz in making the film. In the end, it’s the beauty you can find in such a difficult narrative that makes La Haine that rare and close-to-perfect movie.