‘La Haine’

Mathieu Kassovitz’s​ film La Haine, regarded as a classic in many circles, is currently being shown in UK cinemas to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its release. ‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the word rather than the film. Great movies can be too steady, too serene, and this film is headed in a different direction.

It’s not lacking in beautiful shots. There are cityscapes viewed from a rooftop, the Eiffel Tower shining in the distance like a symbol of light that won’t go out – until it does. There are high-angle visions of slums that look like works of art. The camera lingers on an escalator without people that might be an allegory of life: it doesn’t stop and it doesn’t care.

The film also understands the cinematic equivalent of name-dropping. One of its characters stands in front of a mirror and starts to behave like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, trying out gestures and dialogue to figure out the coolest way of shooting someone. There is an intriguing double track here. Kassovitz is obviously thinking of Scorsese, but the character isn’t. He has simply seen a movie that offers him a model for the management of style and violence. This is ironic, because the film’s plot is based on the historical case of a policeman killing a rioter, supposedly by accident, in 1993. One recurring question is what we can and cannot do with a gun in our hand. For some the trigger is easy to pull, for others the unlikely accident may indeed be an accident, and for others, whatever their ostensible wishes or promises to themselves, the trigger can’t finally be pulled at all.

There is also an elegant parable framing the story. We hear it at the beginning and again at the end. It involves a person falling from a very high building. All the way down, in the air, at every floor perhaps, he says to himself ‘so far so good’ (‘jusqu’ici tout va bien’). Then he hits the ground. The moral is that ‘what matters is not the fall but the landing’ (‘mais l’important ce n’est pas la chute, c’est l’atterrissage’).

The film has its comic moments – as when three would-be thieves manage to hotwire a car, only to discover that none of them knows how to drive. But the work is dominated by the almost unbroken mood of the three young men, who yell at each other and everyone else. It’s not that they are actually angry. Or rather, they may be but we don’t know that. What is clear is that they don’t believe they are alive unless they look and sound tough. There’s a good example of this when they decide to talk to some girls at a party they have crashed. One of them says his friends want to chat but doesn’t chat himself; another can’t think of anything to say; and the third violently insults the girls because that’s the way he talks. All three get thrown out of the party, and the man in charge murmurs sadly: ‘It’s that suburban unrest’ (‘le malaise des banlieues’). This is a mindless cliché but it can also be read as an unintended hint at a form of truth to be explored.

That is what the film does. Whatever the problem of its setting, it’s far worse than malaise. We need to think a little about the word banlieue too. The standard translation is ‘suburb’, and this is technically correct. But a suburb is polite, and a banlieue is an urban wilderness. The ban of the etymology is not negative, it means ‘jurisdiction’; but lieue means at least a league away from everything a city connotes.

The film was shot in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, near Paris – Kassovitz and his team lived there for a while. But of course, in the social imagination any banlieue can stand for any other, and in recent history these locations have always raised the question of race and migration. Which France is this, or what kind of France? Will the quarrels never end?

La Haine opens with footage of a riot and the various behaviours of the rioters and the police. A man called Abdel Ichaha has been wounded by the police and is in intensive care in hospital. The rather jerky storyline follows three of his friends through most of a day and a single night. This whole sequence is marked by timestamps, hours and minutes recorded on a blank screen: 10.38 and 12.43 for starters and 6.01 at the end.

The friends stir up trouble with a group of their peers hanging out on a rooftop. They try in vain to visit Abdel in hospital. One of them reveals that he has in his possession a police revolver that went astray during the riot. He plans to shoot a policeman (any policeman) if Abdel dies. The friends have similar backgrounds but different origins. Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is Jewish, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is an Arab, and Hubert (Hubert Koundé) is Black. Their views range from believing that all police officers are evil to the thought that some police officers might be human. Vinz is the most violent and argumentative, Hubert relatively conciliatory (he still hopes to make it in the world of boxing and we see his family as we do not see those of the others). Saïd seems to invent life chaotically from minute to minute.

After their daytime antics, the three take a train to Paris and visit a drug dealer (François Levantal) who calls himself Astérix. He is a kind of parody of a gay cabaret performer and his idea of fun is tempting Vinz into playing a game of Russian roulette using the police revolver. Naturally only Astérix knows that all the chambers are empty. No sooner do they leave his place than Saïd and Hubert are arrested for being who they are; Vinz manages to escape into the Paris night. Saïd and Hubert are violently roughed up in a police station, a commanding officer calmly watching the whole brutal scene. They are released after a long wait – long enough for them to miss the last train to the banlieue. They do meet up again with Vinz before they fail to leave. The shot of the empty station after the train has departed is haunting, making the men look curiously bereft, as if a train were a purpose or a goal.

The friends run into a gang of skinheads, old enemies spoiling for a fight. They attack each another with savage severity. In the morning they take the first train home, and have scarcely left the station before the police show up and Vinz is shot – by accident, if in this context there are any accidents. The visual part of the film ends with two men holding revolvers to each other’s heads. The rest of the film is a blank screen held for a moment or two.

Can we interpret our fable in the light of this ending? Or vice versa? One grim possibility would be to say it doesn’t matter how you feel when you’re falling, if the end of your fall is the end of everything. A braver reading would suggest that we should look out for our falls before they happen. Is there a way of avoiding them? Could we perhaps learn to think that, in the banlieue or elsewhere, the slogan ‘so far so good’ is always a disguised confession of defeat? The film is dedicated to ‘those who died during its making’. We could think too of those who have died since.