As Mathieu Kassovitz’s cult thriller turns 30, its pertinence and influence continue to reverberate across our own uncertain times.
La Haine is a film stylistically in thrall to classic American gangster movies and pop culture – but with a uniquely French twist. Mathieu Kassovitz’s first feature was lauded at Cannes on its 1995 release for introducing the neglected Parisian banlieues (outer cities) to French cinema, the political class and the popular imagination. This was the director’s coup and route into difficult territory: presenting the unfamiliar in a recognisable, accessible vernacular. While by no means the first film on the subject, La Haine became the prototype. Its popularity opened a portal between the suburbs and the centre, raising consciousness and inspiring filmmakers – from Jacques Audiard to Celine Sciamma – to offer their diverse perspectives on the banlieues.
On my first viewing nearly 20 years ago, La Haine’s bludgeoning force eclipsed any finer reading. Encountering the film again at a 30th anniversary screening, I was struck by its protagonists’ desperate, obsessive attempts to wrest back agency, dignity and to make sense of their volatile situation – most frequently through dark, absurdist humour. The resonance of this impulse today, amid entrenched social divisions, political polarisation and systemic breakdown, feels undeniable. Time also plays a central role in the film, with tension building to a pivotal climax reinforced by the sound of a ticking bomb and title cards counting down the hours. This urgency is contrasted with a sense of paralysis and inertia; of sleepwalking into disaster, all too relevant to our contemporary moment.
The film’s structure sounds this alarm: it unfolds as a day in the life of three friends, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui). An uneasy 24 hours of threat and malaise unfurl across the trio’s suburban estate and Paris, where they travel to escape local heat and recover a debt, only finding more trouble. Meanwhile, their friend Abdel’s life hangs in the balance, and Vinz swears vengeance on the police who assaulted him. The film boasts a documentary authenticity (opening with real footage of protests and riots before neatly segueing into its fictional black-and-white world) but is also highly stylised.
Off-kilter, expressionistic overhead shots of the estate suggest a kind of unwieldy expanse, saturated with KRS-One’s ‘Sound of da Police’ (spliced with NTM and Édith Piaf) floating above the neighbourhood’s concrete towers from a top-storey turntable. Vertigo-inducing dolly zooms and sound effects, including the repeated sound of a gunshot paired with the mimed firing of a weapon or a camera’s shutter, shape Kassovitz’s exaggerated, larger-than-life world. By stressing the gun/camera metaphor, Kassovitz likens the prying lens of journalists in the film (by extension, the tourist filmmaker and filmgoer are implicated) to a different kind of violence – the voyeuristic or careless exposure of a community that fails to bring change. Kassovitz, a middle-class Parisian immersed at the time in B-boy culture, with strong friendships in the banlieues, was fully aware of this risk.
Kassovitz started work on the screenplay in 1993, on the day 17-year-old Makomé M’Bowolé was fatally shot while in police custody. What in 1995 must have felt like an essential confrontation that had the potential to bring not only awareness but societal transformation (the film was screened for French government officials shortly after its release), today must be read as an indictment of how little has changed materially for residents of the outer cities. While the banlieues are now visible, with artists from the suburbs embraced in mainstream French culture, the uninterrupted cycle of police brutality, deprivation and unrest on the outskirts of major French cities, has, to Kassovitz’s regret, also ensured La Haine’s continuing relevance.
The invisible loyalties between Vinz, Hubert and Saïd suggest that they are childhood friends, splintering in young adulthood because of tensions in the neighbourhood – where the riot following the assault of their friend has laid waste to Hubert’s boxing gym – and in their disparate ways of relating to it. Vinz is a hothead, flailing against oppressive authority. Hubert, back home from the navy with a hard-won discipline and fragile maturity (‘la haine attire la haine’), dreams of escaping – his weary mother’s response is to ask him to pick up some lettuce from the shops (women have only incidental roles in the film). Saïd is the clown and little brother of the group with wisdom of his own. His jokes, told eagerly to impress Vinz but also as a means to comprehend his daily reality, hinge around violent misunderstandings. Vinz’s repeated response to these gags, ‘I heard that one with a rabbi’, is a nod from Kassovitz to the joke format as a narrative device, and the fact that the three friends are intended to be representative of the diverse neighbourhood: a Black man, an Arab and a Jew.
The tussle between childhood and adulthood in the film also recalls, in the current context of an ascendant far right, the disavowal of humanity on the basis of race. From a reactionary standpoint, Black youth can never be vulnerable, or children. We witness Hubert’s hard-bitten maturity turn to incandescent rage following an excruciating assault at the hands of sadistic plainclothes cops in Paris and, later, an encounter with a gang of skinheads (featuring a cameo from Kassovitz himself). During a contemplative interlude on a Parisian rooftop, Vinz and Hubert philosophise, trying on proverbs and mottos for size: ‘haste makes waste’, or, with scathing sarcasm, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’. The friends may be kept out of sight on the periphery of a world city, but their situation is a symptom of, not separate from, wider society. At a crucial point as the trio kill time until the first morning train out of Paris, we see footage of the Bosnia War on a bank of TV screens. Then, their friend Abdel’s death is announced. Global disasters bleed into local crises, leading to a sense of overwhelming despair that feels all too familiar.
Saïd’s humour is echoed by Hubert in the film’s emblematic opening and closing joke-as-metaphor about a man falling from a high-rise building with the delusional refrain ‘so far, so good …’ and this unravelling finds its parallel in the decaying social contract with catastrophic consequences. The opening shot pairs a view of the earth from space with a hurtling Molotov cocktail. As the friends take the train into Paris, we realise (with a grimace from Hubert as he looks at passing billboards) that this opening image is a maddening illusion: it is an advert declaring ‘the world is yours’. Saïd later defaces one of these posters to read ‘the world is ours’. This is a mirage and false promise for young men like them, much like the motif of the cow roaming the estate that only Vinz sees: change or hope presented as an impossible chimera, out of reach. In another of the film’s more nuanced, surreal moments, the young men encounter a Polish survivor of a Soviet gulag with a story of futility, suffering and indignity that the trio struggle to understand, but that could be read most obviously as an allegory of their lose-lose situation: the question, the man notes, ‘is not if you believe in God, but if God [or, it could be extrapolated, society] believes in you’.
The film’s ending is pure, vitriolic rage on the part of Kassovitz, and, for all its shock value, an entirely plausible conclusion. It is both pessimistically determinist, consigning Vinz, Hubert and Saïd to their seemingly inevitable fate, and as searing and galvanising as the first time I saw it. There may be no sense or honour in the waste of young life around them, but there is a system of racism, classism and ignorance that the friends are grappling to understand, the better to push against.
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