La Haine (Hate) (1995)
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Cinematographer: Pierre Aïm
Run-Time: 97 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Film Stock: Unavailable
La Haine is the story of a group of teenage minorities in France trying to work their way through the harsh reality of life. The film is extremely neorealist in its formal aspects as well as in its look and how it exudes a certain rough-textured feeling. Though this film is only 97 minutes in total it recounts a single day in the lives of three teenager; Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert. But one single day is 24 hours long, and that is more than enough time for extraordinary events to unfold. La Haine is shot in black & white and conveys a feeling that the world that these teenagers inhabit is in the gray area, they are not confined to these two-dimensional ideologies. Mathieu Kassovitz did an amazing job at crafting real dialogue, capturing raw emotion, and overall just filming one of the greatest films ever made.
[Image: Kassovitz, Mathieu, director. La Haine. Criterion Collection, 1995].
The aesthetic that is created by Mathieu Kassovitz in La Haine is that of a gritty broken urban community outside of traditional bourgeoisie that symbolizes France and French culture. This film has the ability to take me into the world of Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert as they traverse the outskirts of Paris on an Odyssey-esque journey. Neorealism is a style of filmmaking and of film history that involves shooting on-location, low budgets, using non-professional actors, and often dealing with everyday problems and situations. We as the viewer watch this film and cannot help but feel like we are another companion on the trips around the city and around the minds of the characters. La Haine utilizes low contrast black & white images along with light and dark settings as an example of life as being somewhere in the gray area of existence, not limited to yes or no, or only black or only white. Much of this film’s power resides in its heavy focus on style, something that is difficult to explain and even more difficult analyze.
[Image: Kassovitz, Mathieu, director. La Haine. Criterion Collection, 1995].
Emotions are important to any and all films, La Haine uses each character in a certain way to elicit pathos from the viewer. Saïd is a young Arab teenager who the film puts much emphasis on through his connections to other Arab teens in what can be considered the slums of Paris’ outskirts. Saïd gets sympathy from the viewer as his existence is solely based on his ethnicity rather than his thoughts and ideas. Vinz is a young Jewish teenager, one of very few in his neighborhood, another outcast from the traditional French society. Vinz is introduced to us in a highly stylized non-plot related scene where he is seen dancing to a traditional Jewish song while performing a stereotypical Jewish dance. Hubert is a young black teenager who is large in physical stature as well as in his mind, he is very much the philosopher of the group. Hubert is also a well-known boxer which paints him almost as a gentle giant. All three teenagers are placed into tight boxes of their identity, Arab, Jew, and black teenagers that are immediately and often profiled throughout the film. These little boxes of identity resonate throughout the entirety of the film, these characters cannot be separated from these labels as they both are and are not exactly what they seem.
I was first introduced to La Haine the first semester of my sophomore year here at Rutgers University after I had watched an interview with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. This interview decisively changed my life for the better. This was at a time in my life when I wasn’t sure what I wanted, where I was headed, or what my end goal was. I watched this interview and Barry Jenkins mentioned how when he was in film school he and all his friends got together to watch it and ultimately decided they wanted to make their own films, and that La Haine would be the bible, the one singular film that helped them understand where they were headed with their art and their careers. I connected immediately to this sentiment, La Haine would become the film that I would throw on if I was doing school work, or studying, or even about to go to sleep. I let the events of this film saturate into my mind and become one of the guiding films of my artistic style, whether it’s in filmmaking or any other medium. I spend much of my time now even in thinking about the realistic events in this film and how I could possibly take real events from my life and transform them into something infinite, an undying creation of art.
Another reason my love for La Haine continues to bloom is due to the language and the dialogue that accents it is crucial to the connection I have when watching it. Though the film is French and the characters all speak French there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the communication, through the dialogues inflection and phrases the reality of these characters shine through. One of the most important points in this film is when Hubert tells Vinz the story about the man who jumped off a high-rise building and the whole time he’s falling he keeps saying “jusqu’ici tout va bien… jusqu’ici tout va bien… jusqu’ici tout va bien” until finally he ceases to say it because, well, he hits the ground. “Jusqu’ici tout va bien” translated to English roughly as “So far so good”. There’s something oddly optimistic about this scene and even more so with this phrase. Though the man is falling he stays optimistic, it is only from an outsiders’ perspective that someone can understand the immediate danger that he faces. I think this is a decent metaphor for my life. While college and life start to add up and become more and more stressful there is still a small part of me that tells myself “Jusqu’ici tout va bien… Jusqu’ici tout va bien… Jusqu’ici tout va bien”. I only hope that I don’t hit the ground anytime soon.
[Image: Kassovitz, Mathieu, director. La Haine. Criterion Collection, 1995].
Finally, my favorite quote of the entire film:
Hubert – “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… so far so good. How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!”
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