La Haine

The anger echoing on the streets of Paris is shaped by the story of three young people trapped in an outside world surrounded by concrete walls: La Haine. Showing a city from a never-before-seen angle, from the depths of anger and the search for identity, this is a formidable cinematic coup that still retains its dynamics. 

Mathieu Kassovitz is a director who feeds on the classics of French cinema while at the same time transforming the harshness of American cinema into his own style. La Haine is a masterful exploration of social inequality, media manipulation, the cycle of violence and suburban youths’ attempts to define their role models through violence and respect. Inspired by 70s neo-noir, the film recreates the cold sharpness of Tarantino, the frenetic pace of Trainspotting and the tense mood of Taxi Driver in its own unique language. 

Set in the suburbs of Paris in 1995, La Haine reveals like a river the ever-growing anger simmering within marginalized communities, how this anger is reflected in the lives of young people and how it is intertwined with violence. The film places a tight tragic mechanism at its center – not only a political uprising, but also a striking reference to pop culture. 

The story finds a place in the eyes of three young outcasts in this city. Vinz wants to follow in the footsteps of the movie heroes, while Hubert confronts the lies of advertising with a political gaze. Saïd, on the other hand, embraces everything in his own unique way: with graffiti. Paris plays a trick on them with closed walls and prohibitions. As Saïd says, they are actually trapped outside. 

The opening scene of the world hit by a Molotov cocktail places the film at the center of a global problem from the very first minutes. By linking the social situation in the Parisian suburbs to the spread of a universal hatred, the film portrays not only a local problem, but also a worldwide anger: the huge disconnect between these concrete walled immigrant neighborhoods and the white French mainstream. It reflected an environment in which both sides say “Jusqu’ici tout va bien” (“So far, so good”), ignoring the presence of an incendiary fuse, in reference to the first scene. The real “fantasy” at the source of the collapse is not the suburban children, described as “brutalized”, but the worldwide belief that the blows of the batons are more tolerable than social anger. 

Another striking scene in the movie is Vinz’s role in front of the mirror. In that moment, the reflection in Vinz’s eyes is more powerful than his real identity. In his reference to Travis Bickle, Vinz carries an inner desire to be a hero throughout the movie; a kind of artificial identity construction through imitation. Vinz’s harsh and threatening attitude in the mirror, “Yo talkin’ to me?” is an expression of his anger and insecurity towards the outside world in his search for identity. He confronts society through this reflection, but he must also confront his own identity. What he sees in the mirror is not an external threat, but an inner emptiness and a search for identity. Vinz’s reflection is therefore unfortunately an illusion.

Another point I would like to underline is that Kassovitz uses the language of cinema as a weapon. The slow rhythm in the film is not a weakness, as criticized, but rather a striking move to reflect the emptiness and hopelessness of the youth.  

La Haine was actually made before the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory. It is not fundamentally a racist movie. Nor does it contain identity politics. Black Hubert, Arab Saïd and Jewish Vinz each represent a different personality type. Together, they symbolize all marginalized people in France, the embodiment of the expression ‘black-blanc-beur’, which was developed in the 1990s to emphasize France’s new multicultural, multiethnic identity, against the Republican motto ‘bleu-blanc-rouge’. In fact, it’s not hard to find a lesson here: Grunwalski’s story made the film’s message even clearer: sometimes we have to accept disasters bigger than ourselves, but other times we risk falling off a fifty-story building and don’t realize it until it’s too late.

While La Haine leaves us alone with intense emotions and a full head, we invite you to the playlist we prepared with the energy we got from the film: