Written by Alex Santos-Edgar

Mathew Kassovitz’s La Haine tells the story of Vinz, Sayid and Hubert, a jew, an Arab and a black man, who have recovered a policeman’s revolver the day after a protester is hospitalised due to police brutality. We follow them as they go from the suburbs (Banlieues) on the outskirts of Paris, into the city itself over a single day and night. It remains an unflinching, at times difficult to watch, portrayal of the cyclical nature of violence perpetuated by a corrupt system, and speaks to a generation of French youth rejecting the world around them.

Its striking visual style characterised most clearly by its black and white colour palette gives La Haine a certain timelessness, although its influence from 70’s, 80’s American popular culture such as NWA’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’ song, and a reference to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver places the film within a certain anti-authoritarian cultural context.

Kassovitz presents the banlieues Vinz, Sayid and Hubert exist within as slowly decaying, being taken over by the youth with much of the first half of the film taking place near graffiti-covered walls, burned-out cars and rubble. The suburban setting seems almost to speak alongside its characters. To the anger and rage that seems to fill its young men, literally taken out on the city in a form of revenge most easily attainable to them where the focus of such feelings remain holding a gun and a badge. There is a raw power that La Haine portrays, the character of Vinz perhaps embodying this the most strongly, of the unpredictability and destructive power of someone with nothing to lose, and of an alienated generation of young people.

Posters around the city suggest ‘the world is yours’, perhaps a reference to Scarface or New York rapper Nas’ song of the same name, but seems to reflect on such with a nihilism over the real truth, the same picture of earth used on these posters is set alight in the films opening credits with a molotov. In a moment that puts forward this clear division between expectation and the reality constructed through the ongoing rioting, Sayid uses a spray paint can to cross out the ‘y’ in ‘yours’ so that the poster reads ‘the world is ours’. This idea is most clear through Vinz, Sayid and Hubert’s interaction with any figures of authority such as the police or older adults, whom they heavily reject constructing this us vs them divide and thus further separates the youth from adults as an uncontrollable, destructive group. Ultimately though, this attitude suggests that the youth want to burn the world around them, not discriminating between the world of the individuals with the same views as them, and everyone else, as Hubert punches a sole punching bag in his burned down, destroyed gym set up to offer young people another means of focusing their rage.

La Haine remains just as relevant of a film now as it was upon its release in 1995 which begs the question, particularly through the racial lens of Vinz, Sayid and Hubert’s constructed otherness, has anything changed in our society from the continued police violence against minorities. Kassovitz masterfully constructs a story that tightens further and further like a spring hanging on Vinz’s claim to ‘kill a pig’ if the hospitalised protestor, Abdul, dies, leading fundamentally to tragedy and in doing so suggests that such violence is a perpetual cycle.