La Haine
La Haine (1995, Mathieu Kassovitz)
Paris, France. The suburbs. A young man called Abdel is the victim of police brutality, and is hospitalised. Riots. Vinz (Vincent Cassel) finds a gun lost by a policeman during the riots, and wants to fight back. He vows to kill a police if Abdel dies in the hospital, as retaliation for the police brutality.
The movie follows Vinz and his friends Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Hubert (Hubert Koundé) over a span of just twenty-four hours, in the Parisian suburbs where they live. It keeps an unrelenting pace, and is both brutal and gut-wrenching. The suburbs are not a friendly place to be. The police are racist and oppressive, and the youth is fighting back.
I was really absorbed by this movie. Cassel’s performance is nothing short of electrifying. He is so filled with rage and hatred, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. In a direct reference, we see the similarities between his character and that of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.
The friendship between the three young men quickly deteriorates, and the acting from all three is excellent. The characters are well-developed and you get a sense of three distinctly different personalities at odds here.
Kassovitz’s direction is strong and, at times, brutally honest. He has chosen to shoot the movie in black and white, which I felt added some extra authenticity to the look and feel of these suburbs.
The ending will hit you in the gut, make no mistake about it. It’s a strong final point to make, and I enjoyed it immensely. If one can “enjoy” such an ending.
This was a very solid and intense movie, and I don’t doubt that its rating will go up once I watch it again, a few years from now. It feels like the kind of movie that will stand the test of time.
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Thursday, 21 August 2008 at 14:07
Funnily enough, this film is in my top ten for obvious reasons. You can quite clearly see the parallels between Vinz and Bickle. As you say Hanna, the black and white really does accentuate the stark grimness of life in the less salubrious “quartiers” of Paris and only serves to ram home the desperation and menace in Cassel’s remarkable performance. I thought that the scene with the old man recounting his rather bizarre story in the public toilets was just a brilliant piece of writing and straight out of left field. Kassovitz is a great all round talent and no matter how many times I watch this movie, it still manages to grip me by the throat and not let go until way past the final music from the great soundtrack has finished. Superb.