The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

Mathieu Kassovitz

WRITER

Mathieu Kassovitz

STARS

Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui

BEFORE

1993 Café au Lait, Kassovitz’s first movie, is influenced by Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.

AFTER

2001 As an actor, Kassovitz stars in the hugely successful comedy Amélie.

2011 Rebellion, a thriller set in French New Caledonia, is a critical success for Kassovitz, with some of the anger that fueled La Haine.

2014 In Girlhood, French director Céline Sciamma tells another drama of the banlieues, from a girl’s perspective.

Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (Hate) is a movie driven by the anger of three young men from a riot-scarred housing project in the banlieues (high-rise, poor suburbs) of Paris. It won Kassovitz the award for Best Director at Cannes, yet its violence and its criticism of the police made it hugely controversial.

The three men are all sons of immigrants—Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is Jewish, Hubert (Hubert Koundé) is black, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is Arab—and the anger in the movie is fueled by the marginalization of minorities. The trigger for the action is a bavure (slipup) by the police, who beat Abdel, one of the trio’s friends, into a coma.

A spiral of violence

Such bavures were disturbingly common in France at the time, and Kassovitz says he started writing the movie on April 6, 1993, the day a young man from Zaire, Makome M’Bowole, was shot dead in police custody. In the movie, Vinz, who models himself on vigilante Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s movie Taxi Driver, is determined to take revenge on the police. But as Vinz realizes that he is no killer, the three are drawn into a spiral of violence involving police and racist thugs.

The stark black-and-white photography, filmed mostly in the banlieues, and the intensity of the acting, particularly from Cassel, give the movie rawness and realism. Few movies have captured the divide between the haves and have-nots quite so uncompromisingly.

"All the kids around the world have the same problems—in London, New York, Paris, wherever."

Mathieu Kassovitz

What else to watch: The 400 Blows (1959) ✵ Do the Right Thing (1989) ✵ Amélie (2001) ✵ City of God (2002)