FM4 - Urban Stories: La Haine

Urban Stories : La Haine 

NEW: Slant Magazine Blu-ray Review - 'La Haine'

Extract

Almost two decades after its initial release, La Haine remains a timely portrait of a broken social system. From the perspective of the three outraged young men at its center, this system has the face of a multitude of corrupt and abusive policemen. As the film opens, another young man, Abdel, has been severely beaten while in police custody, and in the rioting that ensued Vinz has stumbled upon a gun, lost by a cop in one of the skirmishes. He vows that, if Abdel dies, he'll use the gun to kill a cop, any cop, just as the police, in his view, indiscriminately target and kill thebanlieusards. As they wait for news of Abdel, they survey the aftermath of the rioting: Hubert's gym has been destroyed, the local fence's car has been torched. (The isolation of the banlieues means that most of the damage caused during the periodic uprisings is to the residents' own property.) When they try to visit Abdel in the hospital, the cops turn them away. Periodic flare-ups with the police throughout the film keep the hate well-fueled on both sides.

But it's also a day like any other: Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert hang with their friends; Hubert delivers his latest drug earnings to his mother; Vinz gives Saïd a haircut; they sit for hours on rooftops and courtyards swapping stories and talking trash; they watch the b-boys spin in an empty high-rise lobby; a local DJ, played by Anouar Hajoui, blasts a mix of Hajoui's own "Nique la Police" and Édith Piaf"s "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" out of his apartment window, while a heli-cam shot floats us above the boys and young men doing their best to cope with life's paradoxically desperate timelessness in the courtyard below.

Full review here

<