La Haine (1995): Urban Stories

The convergence of Mathieu Kassovitz’s film and social unrest, however, was nothing new: at the time of its release in 1995, La haine was already, and controversially, linked to suburban violence and police bavures (slipups). The explosive contents of the film, its unusually young creative team (Kassovitz and the three lead actors were all in their twenties), the fact that it won the prestigious best director prize at Cannes, its huge popular success, and the media circus that followed turned La haine into aphénomène de société that reached beyond its cinematic value. This black-and-white chronicle of twenty-four hours in the life of a mixed-race young male trio from a run-down banlieue has resonated ever since.

Kassovitz started writing the script of La haine on April 6, 1993, the day Makome M’Bowole, a young man from Zaire, was shot while in police custody in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. He wondered in an interview “how a guy could get up in the morning and die the same evening in this way.” M’Bowole’s officially accidental death is one of the many bavures that have plagued the French police in recent decades. More than three hundred mortal “slipups” have been recorded since 1981—common enough to have become a topic for comic films. For Kassovitz, however, they were no cause for laughter. Before M’Bowole, another famous case, that of Malik Oussekine, in 1986, had had particular resonance for him, and it is referred to in the opening montage. The narrative spring of La haine is the shooting of a young beur (a second-generation North African) by the police during the riots that open the film. His death in the hospital propels Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) on an eventful journey through their suburban estate (cité) and then central Paris, ending in shocking violence. In the process, the film shows clashes between police and youth, and in one famous scene, two policemen sadistically molest Hubert and Saïd while a trainee officer watches. No wonder La haine instantly, and despite Kassovitz’s denials, acquired the reputation of being antipolice. As the daily Libération reported, after the Cannes gala at which the film received a standing ovation, “uniformed police supposed to form a double ceremonial parade [. . .] ostensibly looked toward the sea; in other words, they turned a hateful back to the team who made the film that hates them.” La haine is punctuated by a ticking clock and by Hubert’s story of a man in free fall—Kassovitz’s metaphor for the banlieue as social time bomb.

Unrest in the working-class banlieue was a familiar phenomenon before La haine. The cités concentrate social problems: run-down housing, a high concentration of young people from immigrant back­grounds, drugs, and rampant unemployment. Their social deprivation and cultural alienation are echoed in their topographical isolation from the city center. As in the film, they are routinely portrayed in the media as violent, dysfunctional spaces. But if La haine had, in the words of one journalist, “the effect of a bomb,” taking the Cannes Film Festival and then cinemas across France by storm in May and June of 1995, it was also because its effect seemed to continue to reverberate after it came out. On June 8 and 9, shortly after the release, there were violent riots in the Butte-Verte cité, in Noisy-le-Grand, east of Paris, provoked by yet another death of a young beur, Belkacem Belhabib, who crashed his motorbike while being chased by the police. Coming so soon after La haine, the Noisy-le-Grand riots were inevitably seen as “copycat,” sparking a debate about the responsibility of the film in particular and of the media in general for the violence engulfing French society. The daily France-Soir neatly entitled its June 9 story “Noisy-la-Haine,” and the far-right Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen exclaimed: “Do these yobs have la haine? Send them to jail!” François Dubet, a sociologist renowned for his work on the banlieues, wisely cautioned that “one must not overestimate the role of cinema or television; the banlieue kids did not wait for La haine to express themselves.” Nevertheless, the die was cast. La haine had its finger on the pulse of the French malaise: President Jacques Chirac sent an appreciative letter to Kassovitz, Prime Minister Alain Juppé asked for the film to be screened for government officials, teachers from “difficult” suburbs took their pupils to see it.

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