Urban Stories: La Haine

There is a formal struggle in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) between unflinching realism and filmic self-consciousness. Much has been made of the picture’s sociological importance but an awareness of its cultural implications should not cloud an appreciation of its sophisticated construction.

The film presents a day in the life of three youths in an unidentified Parisian slum. It begins with black-and-white documentary footage of real riots and starts, as a result, with a feel of historical authenticity. The cinematographic choice to shoot in a similar black-and-white look seems to bind the film proper to the stock footage with which it opens: on the one hand, the fiction of La Haine is allowed the authority of history. The story begins the day after a riot in which a police inspector’s gun has gone missing: on the other hand, then, history fills in narrative blanks, as the tumult recorded in the stock footage acts as a surrogate for the fictional riot that we are not allowed to see.

The narrative is full of similar holes, as well as tedious stories, dead-ends and unfunny jokes: it appears as uneven as life. Take, for example, when, sat killing time in a park, a young boy tells Vinz (Vincent Cassel) a story about a celebrity who’s been set up for the television show Candid Camera. The tale crescendos as the celebrity tries “to act cool” but, as he gets more uneasy, inevitably “starts ranting at [a] guy”. Finally, the story climaxes only by petering out: “They start fighting and the Candid Camera guys have to break it up.” “Then what?” “That’s all.” “Who was the celebrity?” “Dunno, but he was real famous. I don’t remember.” Later, Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) ruins a potentially funny joke by over-telling it. He begins, “Heard the one about the nun?” He recounts how a drunken man, leaving a bar, comes across a nun in a long black cape. He starts beating her up and, after about five minutes, finally says “You’re not so tough, Batman!” The comedy is defused when Saïd exclaims, after a brief pause, “He thought the nun was Batman!” Vinz rounds off the deadening by saying, “I heard it was a rabbi.”

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