My Favourite Film (La Haine (HD DVD))

Member Name: venceremos

Product:	La Haine (HD DVD)
Date:	28/10/09 (61 review reads)
Rating:

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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 example, I'd have La Haine coming out of the blue corner every time. It is, quite simply, my favourite film ever. As this is my fiftieth film only review on dooyoo, I thought it was about time.

La Haine was released in 1995 and was Mathieu Kassovitz's second ever feature film, his first, "Matisse" coming out in 1993 with more modest acclaim. Mathieu's father Peter fled to France from Hungary after the 1956 coup to become a film director (credits include "Jakob the Liar" starring Robin Williams), and his paternal grandparents were Jewish concentration camp survivors.

The film follows a day in the life of three "banlieusards" (estate-dwellers): Hubert (played by Hubert Kounde) of black sub-Saharn African extraction, Said (played by Said Taghmaoui) who is Arabic and Vinz (played by Vincent Cassel), a white Jew.

Some explanation may inform your viewing of this film. La Haine is set in a "banlieu" and the best translation would be council estate, except these are the ones you find just outside city centres, mainly of apartment blocks surrounding a central square, play area or park. Another translation would be suburb, because banlieusards would literally mean suburb-dwellers, except in Britian the concept of suburbia is more middle class.

Indeed, until World War Two, the word "banlieu" did indeed evoke to the French a semi-rural environment with small houses and gardens, but those planners of the 60's and their ideas changed things. They tried to recreate a living area for the urban workforce which would be a peaceful oasis away from the bustle of city life, while remaining all the same in close proxinmity to it. They also tried to cope with a population influx of rural French and immigrant labourers, the latter mainly from North Africa. Their solution was to build the cut-price modernist HLMs ("habitations a loyer modere", basically council flats) typified by the tower block and rabbit hutch accommodation seen on this side of the Channel, with similar problems regarding funding and disrepair. Such were the size of these estates, they became known as "cites", literally "cities". The areas they were situated in were the banlieus, the estates surrounding the city centre, and the inhabitants known as banlieusards.

You may have realised by now I can't do the funny French accents over the letters, or cedillas, or anything else clever like that. I'm about as technologically advanced as Harry Patch.

Anyhow, at the time the film was released, even the victorious right wing Chirac was going on about doing something to heal the "fracture sociale" that had divided the banlieusards from the rest of society. There had been riots in the banlieus of Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Lille some three years earlier, and a new counter-culture had formed out of the deprivation and cynicism of these overpopulated and under-employed cites. One notable product of this counter-culture was a new street slang, used as a marker of its own identity: verlan.

No matter how good your GCSE French is, unless you're a native speaker, you're going to need the subtitles here. Verlan is used by the banlieusards constantly throughout the film, as they would in life. A rule of thumb would be to reverse the syllables of a word - for example, "car" would be "voiture" in French but "turvoi" in verlan - but it's not a hard and fast rule and goes beyond even that. There are linguistic imports, such as Arabic slang, and even the title of the film bases itself on the verlan preference for "avoir la haine" ("to have hate") rather than the mainstream French infinitives "detester" or "hair" (both literally meaning "to hate"). Largely lost on an English-speaking viewer, this multi-ethnic argot betrays a banlieusard's background in his speech, and carries with it associations of criminality and chavness to a more bourgeois listener.

Back to our three protagonists, alliteratively referred to as "black blanc beur" ("beur" was originally the verlan word for "arabe", yet passed so completely into the French mainstream language, it too has now been re-verlanised as "rebeu"), and we see them meeting up the morning after a riot the night before. Said calls round for Vinz, and they go to the burnt-out gym to see Hubert, the proprietor, who's punching the heavy bag. The three mates are smoking weed, as young men do, and they leave the derelict building to go about their business.

Along the way, we learn a couple of salient points about the previous night's riot: it was caused by the hospitalisation of Abdel Ichaha, a friend of the three, at the hands of the police under interrogation, and that a policeman's handgun went missing during the riot.

We follow as the three unemployed banlieusards' lives unfold throughout the day. They go with Said to visit a fence who owes him money, they go with Hubert to do some drug dealing, they talk with friends about the events of the riot. Vinz boasts about the beatings he gave the police, yet he is also convinced that at one stage he saw a cow.

A little later, Vinz shows his compadres a little secret: he was the one who got hold of the gun taken from the police last night. Said is impressed, Hubert angry and dismissive. They head on to the hospital to check on Abdel, Vinz packing the gun but not telling the others.

At the hospital, the police refuse the banlieusards permission to see Abdel, and Vinz reacts in an overly aggressive way. A confrontation ensues, and Said is hauled off to the local nick (also destroyed in the riot), with the other two following on in tow as witnesses. Local beat cop Samir gets Said released as a favour to his elder brother Nordine, who he's worked with, and promises to help Hubert get funding to re-build his gym. Vinz remains belligerent, and refuses to shake Samir's hand.

By now you're getting a feel for the characters: the black Hubert is strong yet wise, the Jewish Vinz hot-headed and aggressive and the Arabic Said the wheeler-dealer and joker of the pack, all perhaps in contrast to conventional racial stereotyping. It's this sense of depth and realism that lends real credibility to life on the cites, and we are then shown a contrast, when the trio travel to the central Paris area that the tourists see, for the purpose of collecting a re-assigned debt. There, Said is pleasantly surprised that a policeman he asked directions from used the "vous" form of address - a formality and politeness from an authority figure obviously so far foreign to him.

But not all cops are the same. I realise I've told you much already, but be prepared to see two of our heroes get some serious police brutality, and some horrible racist abuse. It's another part of life on the streets, as seen from a banlieusard's point of view, and presented starkly to a mainstream French audience. Indeed, it was the world that was watching, with excluded sections of many other countries the world over able to identify with the hardships faced by our young "black blanc beur" trio.

There's so much more to admire. In typically French moments of self-absorption, Kassovitz arranges for pairs of conversations to happen at the same time, both equally audible, as if to create a nightmare when it comes to subtitling for a non-French speaking audience, a problem the subtitlers don't really get to grips with. He plays with focus shots, and sound. Apart from the very start and very end, the whole film is in black and white, albeit that it was originally shot in colour. Hip hop music is predominant in the soundtrack, as it is in the cites, and there are some fantastic displays of DJ mixing and breakdancing. Despite the macho bravado and sexist aggression, the female matriarchs are given respect, while the male authority figures are either impotent or challenged. The banlieusards aren't depicted as angelic victims either - our trio come across as real jerks at times, as on one occasion their crass and boorish behaviour sees them excluded from an art gallery.

"It's about a society falling" - well, there were riots again in 1995, 1997 and 2005, and again it was exclusion, unemployment and racism (including the rise of Le Pen's National Front) behind it all. Ask any French Arab you meet what La Haine means to him, and whether anything has changed. I won't speak for him or her, but those I've talked to tell me the film is still relevant today. The mirror it held up to French society then has the same reflection now. Unfortunately, French society simply chooses to look the other way, especially now with Sarkozy elected to power. Expect more rioting in the banlieus in the years to come.

Finally, I simply haven't seen a better ending to a movie than this one. End of.

This is a film that will make you laugh in some places, and shock you in others, but will ultimately make you think. If French subtitled black and white cinema isn't really your thing, then think again. The global appeal should tell you that this is no ordinary piece of arty French extravagance, but an accessible and entertaining work we can all have an opinion about.

Summary: Encore