Following the questions opened few weeks ago with the film we watched by Claire Denis´ Beau Travail, this week's film: La Haine represents the counter-part of the question. If Denis' film portrays the obsoletism of the ideal of Colonialism, we believe that Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine is a beautifully-shot urban study of the late consequences of Post-colonialism. The film departs from the radical riots that in the 1990's confronted French police with the working-class areas on the edge of large cities such as Paris or Lyon for instance. The suburbs in questions (banlieue in French) are housing states originally built in the early 60's, designed to host workers near the factories where they worked. However, in the following three decades these suburbs became a black spot in the modern vision of France by the French government since in these areas nowadays lives a largely unemployed population of immigrants originating from the old French colonies whom often mistakingly perhaps relate to drug-dealing, robbery and violence. La Haine is a highly inspiring, provocative and very entertaining account of some of these historical facts.
Synopsis:
La Haine is a cinema-verite film telling the story of a modern Paris trio in their rage against authority at the core of French society's economic, ethnic and cultural anxieties. Opening with documentary footage of riots, the film unfolds a mixture of the three main characters personalities along the city: the originally Jewish Vinz, who is the angriest but perhaps the least intelligent; the calmer yet most dispairing about the future North-African Said; and the most mature Afro-Caribbean descent Hubert.
After a riot, in which police shot badly a youth inmigrant who was very close to the community, Vinz finds a lost gun that will activate the solidarity against the authority but it will also unfold waves of fury and variety of disagreements . Following the three in the hopeless routine of the ''ghetto'' where music, dance and drug consumption are daily bread, the story twists when the group set a journey into town to visit their mate in hospital. The confrontation with the police experiences then a climax and a later-on second visit to the heart of Paris will carry unexpected consequences.
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