As well as the run-down, gritty scenery, location shooting has the advantage of completely free-moving camerawork, giving La Haine a distinct documentary style.įrom using this, the director gives the film a feel of validity. From shooting on location in France, the audience can really get a feel for the living conditions and increases the believability and realism dramatically. La Haine is set in les banlieue, in the suburbs of Paris.
The film was shot in black and white, which immediately gives La Haine a sense of authenticity with a gritty and realistic look. This is achieved in a number of ways, including elements in the setting, language, narrative structure, and so on. One of the reasons that La Haine worked so well in attracting large audiences and media attention was how realistic the film appeared to be. The problem of social exclusion was (and still is) one of the biggest political issues in France, and the directorwriter’s intention was to tackle it head-on. We're still falling past the skyscraper's windows, but the pavement is getting closer and closer.In the mid 1990’s when La Haine was released it was met to great critical acclaim as it presented the major social issues at the time for modern day France. La haine is over twenty years old, but because the antagonism it identifies has only gotten more acute, it feels much more recent. You'll be left scratching your head over how they managed to dolly over Vincent Cassel's head to the mirror in front of him while remaining completely out of sight, and the last "Oh no they didn't!" cliffhanger dolly shot is sheer eye-candy for alumni of the Tarantino school of cooler-than-thou camera technique.Īlongside the charismatic central trio, Kassovitz has peopled his world with memorable minor characters, like the little old man with an anecdote about shitting in the woods on the way to a Siberian labor camp, and the recently divorced drunk who helps our heroes evade grand theft auto charges by dancing on the hood of the pursuing squad car. Not a single shot feels impromptu rather, Kassovitz and cinematographer Pierre Aïm are almost too in control. A neighborhood DJ syncs Edith Piaf with KRS-One, Saïd does an uncanny Belmondo impression, and the last scene features an inexplicable massive mural of Baudelaire, but integration has clearly not been a runaway success.īringing a lot of anthropological-colonial problems with it, the word "raw" is commonly applied to La haine (at least by The LA and NY Times, The Economist, and The Guardian), but the film is actually much closer to the "cooked" end of the spectrum. Hubert, the most politically conscious of the bunch, tells Vinz a joke that functions as the film's central metaphor: A man falls out of a skyscraper, and with each floor he passes, he thinks to himself, "So far so good, so far so good…" French society is collapsing, but no one will admit how bad it is until there's nothing but rubble left.īeyond the Republic's founding "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" motto-which the protagonists dismiss as a platitude-"Frenchness" enters only rarely into their milieu's cultural consciousness, dominated as it is by Glocks and Desert Eagles, Yamahas, Cypress Hill, and American sportswear. After trashing a bourgeois art opening ("La malaise des banlieues," the gallerist laments), trying to take a cab with a stolen credit card, and attempting to hotwire a Citroën, they settle on smoking hashish and philosophizing. The only element it takes from the fairy tale is the chronology: when friends Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert ( Vincent Cassel, Saïd Taghmaoui, and Hubert Koundé) get too bored in their heavily-policed housing project in the Parisian suburbs (or banlieues) and go into the city to collect a debt from a nunchuck-wielding tweaker named Asterix, a run-in with evidence-planting undercovers makes them miss the last commuter train at midnight, mooring them in the hostile city for the night. Mathieu Kassovitz isn't exactly a one-hit wonder, but he has yet to one-up his urban Cinderella story, La haine (1995).ĭon't get me wrong, there's no diamond-in-the-rough or rags-to-riches stuff in La haine (French for "hatred").