La Haine (HD DVD)

Overview The tale of three friends in a Paris housing estate shortly after a great riot which has rocked Paris. Review This is certainly not the sort of film I normally watch or would look to buy myself. Its good to have an open mind though. Often in life, its when you do something slightly out of the usual, something you wouldn't normally do, that you experience something truelly wonderful. This is certainly the case with La Haine. It premiered at the 1995 Cannes film festival were it won the best film prize before going on to win numerous other awards. These often seem to be prizes for grittiness to me, who can make the obscurest, least ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review

French cinema is not to everyone's taste. There are times it doesn't do itself any favours, of course. At times, it tries too hard to be inaccessible, or controversial simply for the sake of it. It seems wrapped up in its own self absorption, closed off to all but the most dedicated cinema goers, who'll sit in some fleapit night after night smoking endless Gauloises, and appreciating the niceties of mise en scene. Nevertheless, the French film industry doesn't need Hollywood's millions, approval or awards ceremonies to sustain it, and the French seem to like it that way, so they're obviously doing something right. If I wanted to defend French cinema using an ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears in part on Flixster and The Student Room La Haine (hate) is an extremely powerful film about how life is in the banlieues (slums) in France. The French cities are set out such that, instead of the richer areas all being out in the countryside, it is the poorer areas that sit on the outskirts, all facing in at each other such to only enhance the atmosphere of dread and depression that runs rampant throughout. This film examines the victims of that system, both as it means that they internalise the violence upon each other, and therefore find nothing but disrespect for the police. The protagonist is Vinz (Vincent Cassel), an angry ...  Read the complete review