A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

If you look at Mathieu Kassovitz’ 1995 modern classic La Haine with a dispassionate eye, it’s easy to criticise the film. It is obnoxious in the way it demands our attention, not too dissimilar from some of its protagonists and their look-at-me-fuck-you-too way of life. It can be accused, and fairly so, of being derivative, in terms of its style and its story: there’s more than a little Mean Streets and Do the Right Thing to the the film. And it’s not exactly subtle – when given the choice between going loud and going nuanced, nine out of ten times it will choose the former.

But, bloody hell, if La Haine isn’t still tremendously effective – and timely.

La Haine follows three young men in the Parisian banlieues, the suburbs populated by immigrants and others less well off, in which social unrest is rife, for a period of 24 hours. Riots took place the day before, not for the first time, not for the last, and Abdel, a young local man of most likely North African or Middle Eastern extraction, is in intensive care after having been badly injured by the police. The Jewish Vinz (a freakishly young Vincent Cassel), who’s been more than flirting with the thug life, has found the police gun that went missing during the riot, and pledges to kill himself a cop should Abdel die. His friend Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui, probably a familiar face to many from John Wick 3, Wonder Woman or even good old Lost) is a follower first and foremost, striving to imitate whoever seems to be coolest around him but rare to initiate anything. Meanwhile, the third friend, Hubert (Hubert Koundé – yes, this is one of those films where many of the characters have the same first names as the actors playing them), is quite different from the other two: he seems older, and he is clearly more mature and reasoned. Hubert has little wish to become involved in the riots – not least because, as a black man, he is an easy target for the Parisian police already. (An effective scene mid-film has Hubert and Saïd taken in by the police and pretty much tortured, and the suggestion is that they’re much more likely to get this kind of treatment than the (few) white kids in the banlieues.) To a large extent, Hubert seems to act as an older brother or almost a parental figure – in a world where it’s not clear how many of these young men still have both parents, and whether those parents are around much to raise them.

It sounds like the start of a joke, doesn‘t it? A Jew, a Muslim and a Black man walk into a banlieue. Or, more accurately, they walk through a banlieue, because they‘re sure as hell not getting out of there, however hard they try. If it‘s a joke, it‘s one of the grim kind – just like the one that La Haine starts with: a man falls from a very high building, and as he passes each floor falling increasingly fast, he tells himself, „So far, so good. So far, so good.“ (It sounds better in the French original: „Jusqu‘ici tout va bien. Jusqu‘ici…“) And the film captures exactly this energy of a grim joke, of laughing because the alternative is too dire to contemplate. As long as you ignore the ground that’s rapidly rising to meet you, you’re fine. And this fits the protagonists: Vinz especially, but also Saïd, they are basically ridiculous kids playing at being gangsters and cool guys, but if they think of the likely outcome of this playacting, they only do so in the most abstract terms. It says a lot about Vinz that he plays at imitating Travis Bickle, „You talkin‘ to me?“-ing at the mirror, even though he obviously doesn‘t have a clue why Bickle isn‘t someone to emulate. Their anger may be real, but their chosen means of revolting against the real issues (which La Haine only occasionally addresses head-on) is a pose. For now, they’re fine, as they hurtle towards the ground. For most of the film, the serious part of the joke comes in via Hubert, who has the self-awareness, and a likely experience of real suffering, that especially Vinz lacks. Hubert knows that it‘s not the fall that matters: it‘s the landing.

La Haine cannot be pinned down to a single genre. Some scenes are clearly played for laughs, others are grim and serious, some are self-consciously dramatic, and yet others are absurd. The film’s political commentary isn’t necessarily deep; it is interested more in giving its audience a sense of what life in the banlieues might be like for young men. And it is very much a male perspective: a handful of female characters turn up occasionally, grandmothers, mothers and sisters, but they are not even supporting characters so much as backdrop. And while Kassovitz highlights the absurdity and ridiculousness of the performative tough-guy masculinity of the likes of Vinz, but also of some of the policemen the film portrays, he also has an affinity for it, and even when La Haine makes fun of its characters, it has affection for them. It is very much in the film’s favour that only one of the trio, Vinz, is outright obnoxious (though even he has moments when he’s almost okay), and Hubert, the one who’s largely devoid of the toxicity of many of the other young men we see, is clearly the most charismatic of the three.

Verdict: Spike Lee considered La Haine a “complete rip-off” of Do the Right Thing, and he does have a point. Like Vinz and Saïd especially, the film they feature in is one that imitates the style, attitude and behaviour of those movies it is inspired by. Just like Vinz poses in the mirror, trying to out-Bickle Bickle, the movie has its own mirror routine, though arguably there’s as much Mean Streets (to stick with Martin Scorsese) as there is Spike Lee. In what was only his second film, Mathieu Kassovitz tapped into a rich vein, the lives of young men behaving badly in times of social strife and discontent. But if La Haine isn’t altogether original, it still does its forebears proud thanks to its filmmaking – looking at Kassovitz’ later movies, it can sometimes feel like he used up 95% of his talent on this one film. La Haine‘s effectiveness is unsurpassed, it is kinetic and angry and exuberant. Its perspective may be narrow, and there are many stories left untold that the film barely acknowledges in its ultra-specific focus on young, disaffected men, but this doesn’t make La Haine a bad film, it just means that this is the story that Kassovitz’ film tells. La Haine shouldn’t be held to task for not representing an entire community and culture, though it should be recognised for what it is: a film with a very specific perspective.

And have I mentioned the aesthetics of La Haine? Criterion’s recent 4K release is probably the best the film has ever looked. Its locations are grungy and messy, and for most audiences this will be a Paris they’ve not often seen (though there is a fun little scene featuring that most clichéd Parisian landmark, the Eiffel Tower). The black-and-white cinematography by Pierre Aïm is rich and beautiful. Again, as with much of the film, there is an element to its aesthetic that feels like a pose, a late-adolescent attitude – La Haine, much like Vinz, comes across as wanting to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse -, but this fits the film, its characters and themes, and ironically it’s part of what gives La Haine its longevity – together with the fact that the underlying issues are still very much present, just like the ongoing social tensions in the banlieues. Vinz & Co live like there’s no tomorrow, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – but jusqu’ici… jusqu’ici…