La Haine (1995)
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Writer: Mathieu Kassovitz
Stars: Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui
24 hours in the lives of three young men in the French suburbs the day after a violent riot.
***
Hatred breeds hared.
This is the basic idea of this movie. That people will always hate other people. And the more you hate, the more contagious it becomes. And it spreads. And in the end, all you see is a big chaos, full of destruction, where everyone points the blame, but no one is willing to let go of all the hatred.
To be frank, I didn’t enjoy this movie. It has a very dark and depressing tone. The fact that it is in black and white only helps to bring out this tone of anger that is has. It shows 3 friends from a housing project for foreigners in Paris. Or to be more precise, from the ghetto. It shows them over the course of one day, in the aftermath of a riot.
There is nothing spectacular about this movie. More like depressing. You see 3 young guys, killing time all day, without a purpose, wandering the streets. You see the police how they first tend to judge and abuse them. And then, these already angry and frustrated young guys tend to fight back. It is a vicious circle of hatred that can only end bad for everyone involved.
Although I may not like the movie, it does show a truly harsh and ugly reality. Where people are mistreated just because someone doesn’t like their face. And after a while, the mistreated start to fight back. They think that they are fighting the system, but in the end, they just fight each other. Even if they will never understand that.
