La haine
Mathieu Kassovitz (1995)
La haine was first released in France on the last day of May in 1995. BFI gave Mathieu Kassovitz’s famous film extensive twenty-fifth anniversary coverage in the May 2020 issue of Sight & Sound, with the three lead actors on the front cover and pieces inside about La haine‘s instant impact and lasting influence – the latter evident in the latest high-visibility drama of strife in the Paris banlieues, Ladj Ly’s Les misérables. (This review may well exaggerate their kinship but I watched Les misérables ten days before seeing La haine for the first time: a compare-and-contrast approach is hard to resist.) In Ly’s film, a seminal act of police violence occurs on screen. In Kassovitz’s, it has taken place before the action begins. Abdel Ichacha, a teenager from a North African immigrant family, is in a coma, following a police beating; the incident has provoked serious unrest in the Chanteloup-les-Vignes commune. Les misérables’s timeframe is no more than two days and La haine’s even more compressed – twenty hours. The screen repeatedly indicates the time, to the minute.
Whereas Ly’s main focus is on three police officers, Kassovitz’s is on three friends of Abdel. Like him, these are residents of the Muguet housing projects. Each is from a different ethnic group: Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is Jewish, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is a North African Muslim, Hubert (Hubert Koundé) is Afro-French. The last-named, a small-time drug dealer, is also a boxer, or was until the gym where he trains burned down in the recent riots. Kassovitz follows them through the day and into the evening, when they take a train into central Paris. By that stage, they’ve already had a couple of run-ins with the police, who break up a roof-top gathering and prevent Vinz, Saïd and Hubert from visiting Abdel in hospital. Some of the threesome’s behaviour in between is aimless, unlike Kassovitz’s narrative. Early on, Vinz vows to take revenge on the police if Abdel dies. It soon emerges that, following a recent disturbance at the local police station, an officer lost his gun and that Vinz is now in possession of the weapon. The destination of the story is pretty clear.
How Kassovitz reaches that destination is less obvious. He takes you by surprise both in his shocking presentation of racially motivated police brutality and through a series of encounters in central Paris that are variously disorienting for the principals. Saïd’s amiably racist remarks to Hubert – when the latter declines his offer of chocolate, Saïd says, ‘Of course, you’re chocolate already’ – are startling enough. They’re nothing beside the physical and verbal abuse meted out to the pair of them when they’re apprehended by plain clothes cops. While the youngsters are in a public toilet, a diminutive old man (Tadek Lokcinski) emerges from a cubicle to recall being part of a consignment of Gulag prisoners, one of whom refused to defecate in front of others and froze to death as a result. The trio then visits the sleek apartment of Astérix (François Levantal), a drug addict who owes Saïd money. They leave with the debt unpaid and with Vinz rattled and humiliated: hophead Astérix forces him to play Russian roulette before revealing that the gun had been unloaded. Having missed their last Metro train home, the friends make a sex-pest nuisance of themselves when they gatecrash a late-night gathering in an art gallery. They then try to hotwire a parked car and are interrupted in the act by a middle-aged drunk who tells them his wife has left him (small as the part is, Vincent Lindon makes a strong impression).
This last encounter is the prelude to La haine’s violent climax. Vinz, Saïd and Hubert spend the night in a shopping mall, where they learn from a news report on a giant TV screen that Abdel Ichacha is dead. In a fight with a group of skinheads, Saïd and Hubert are coming off much the worse until Vinz and his .44 magnum intervene. Vinz captures one of the skinheads (played by Mathieu Kassovitz), intending to kill him. A combination of lack of nerve and Hubert dissuade him. Early next morning, the three arrive back in Chanteloup-les-Vignes and bump into the police officer who was mocked by Vinz in a set-to the previous day. By now, Vinz has handed his firearm to Hubert. When the irate cop grabs Vinz and tauntingly holds a gun to his head, Hubert rushes in; the startled policeman lets his gun go off, killing Vinz instantly. It was 06:00 when the friends emerged from the local station; the screen now shows 06:01. Hubert and the officer point guns at each other. Saïd can’t bear to watch and closes his eyes. As the screen goes black, a single shot is heard. La haine ends without an indication of whose weapon fired it.
When he wrote and directed this film, at the age of twenty-seven, Mathieu Kassovitz was already a well-known actor: earlier in 1995, he’d won the César for Most Promising Actor for Jacques Audiard’s See How They Fall. Kassovitz is probably still thought of primarily as the author of La haine but none of the films he’s directed subsequently has made much impression, outside France anyway. (The most recent, Rebellion, was nearly a decade ago, during which time he’s continued to do plenty of acting.) It’s easy to say with hindsight but I don’t find it surprising that Kassovitz hasn’t come close to repeating this success, even allowing that La haine set the bar high. The film is remarkable to look at – not only distinctive for its time because it’s in black and white but also full of unexpected perspectives: nearly every shot is spectacular. (The DP was Pierre Aïm.) There are downsides to both things, though. The monochrome that seems appropriate to the starkness of Kassovitz’s subject matter has an oddly hygienic quality[1]. The unrelenting high-impact images chime with the narrative’s remorselessness but they also turn La haine into a kind of show – albeit an extraordinary show.
This effect is reinforced by the film’s dominant performance, from Vincent Cassel. It’s no surprise that, of the three leads here, he went on to by far the most successful acting career. Cassel has repeatedly demonstrated over the years that he’s an actor who thrives on energy (when he’s quiet, he’s hardly there at all); that trait is very much in evidence in this early role. In one of the film’s most famous moments, Vinz stands at a bathroom mirror, doing his take on Taxi Driver‘s ‘You talkin’ to me?’ episode. He isn’t actually holding a gun but mimes doing so, aiming at his reflection in the mirror. Vinz’s version of Travis Bickle, powerful as it is, somehow encapsulates Cassel’s virtuoso playing of Vinz. He’s exceptionally dynamic but on top of the character rather than inside it. You never look at him and feel this really is a deprived youngster from the banlieues.
The leaves-you-guessing confrontation that ends Les misérables looks like another debt to La haine. So too, perhaps, is the high-minded Victor Hugo quote that appears on the screen at the close of Ladj Ly’s film – though La haine takes a rather different route to sententiousness. At the very start, Hubert’s voiceover tells a joke: ‘Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself, “So far so good… so far so good”. How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!’ Hubert repeats the joke during the film. During the final stand-off between him and the police officer, the voiceover returns, adjusting the words of the joke to deliver the moral of Kassovitz’s story: ‘It’s about a society on its way down and, as it falls, it keeps telling itself …’ etc etc.
At the beginning of the same month that ended with the release of La haine, Jacques Chirac became President of France. His new Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, ‘commissioned a special screening of the film for the cabinet, which ministers were required to attend’ (Wikipedia). Twenty-four years later, Emmanuel Macron, on seeing Les misérables, asked his‘government to find ideas and act to improve living conditions in the banlieues’ (also Wikipedia). Macron’s reaction alone serves as compelling evidence of the continuing urgency of the sociopolitical issues that Mathieu Kassovitz’s succès de scandale raised. Its legacy among cineastes, however, has a rather different feel. When a film’s reputation has endured like this one’s has, people can get sentimental about it, despite the content. I know the feeling: I was a bit appalled when I settled down to watch A Clockwork Orange at BFI a couple of years ago in a nostalgic frame of mind, recalling the excitement of seeing it for the first time, as a teenager. Kubrick’s film was still strong enough to bring me to my senses but that doesn’t seem to have happened to Mark Kermode, on his latest viewing of La haine. He concluded his BBC slot the other week by saying that, although the title translates as ‘hate’, La haine left him thinking it was, rather, ‘about love’. It’s true that Vinz, Saïd and Hubert have a desperate camaraderie. But Kermode is superimposing his feelings about the film – as a piece of film-making that has stood the test of time – on the feelings that Mathieu Kassovitz means La haine to express.
17 September 2020
[1] I didn’t know, until reading an online review by an American called Quinton Bailey (https://tinyurl.com/y5n4uhqv), that La haine was ‘[f]ilmed in color but published entirely in black and white due to budget restrictions’. Could this help to explain the resulting visuals’ lack of texture?