La Haine (HD DVD)

Bit of a change to my last review, this time, we are embarking on a much grittier topic… As some of you may have gathered from my title & the name of this film, this is a French film and is subtitled, but I will touch a bit more on this later, normally I do not focus on the fact that a film is subtitled and this does not make me choose to not watch a film, but I think this really is a point worth mentioning, so keep your eyes peeled further down. This film holds a really important place in French film-making history, it is of a very different style to the other films that were being produced at the time, tackles an extremely controversial ...

La Haine opens with a shot of a Molotov cocktail falling in slow motion towards the earth and a voice-over is heard relating a joke about a man falling from a skyscraper repeating to himself “So far, so good…So far, so good”. This joke is retold at the end of the film, employing the dramatic technique of circular cohesion that is often effective with revolutionary satires, but with the term “society” replacing “man”. This tells us the question the film is posing is ‘When will society fall?’ The main body of the film follows three young men living in a deprived area of Paris, a setting that provides ...

The French riots in November 2005 shocked the world, and brought the condition of the “banlieues”, or ghetto-like suburbs which exist in many of the country’s largest cities, to the top of France’s agenda. Whilst the violence was pretty shocking, the most shocking point is that these problems are nothing new, and that the government has just turned a blind eye for years. Ten years ago, a young director called Mathieu Kassovitz made “La Haine”, meaning Hate – a film which tackled the banlieue crisis head on. I don’t really know if it was successful back then, as it was a bit before my prime, but in 2004 it came right back into the public eye when its bleak depiction of ...