'La Haine'

BOYZ IN THE BANLIEUE:
MATTHIEU KASSOVITZ’S "La HAINE"

Matthieu Kassovitz’s recent film La Haine [Hate] confronts the viewer with a France far removed from both the broad boulevards of the capital and the small rural towns of the provinces. Instead, the setting, a banlieue of Paris, and the protagonists, an African, an Arab, and a Jew, offer dramatic illustrations of the social changes and racial tensions that characterize the contemporary scene. La Haine tells the tale of what happens when a country imports labor in times of economic growth, and then fails to provide for these previously needed immigrants when their labor becomes expendable.

The film centers around the experiences of three male suburbanites [banlieusards] on the day after riots have occurred in their housing development in response to the beating of one of their friends by the police. The plot is loosely based on the actual police beating, during a 1986 student protest, of a young Arab, Malik Oussekine, who died from his wounds. Each of the film’s characters comes from one of the three groups most visible as outsiders in today’s France. Hubert, a young African, is a small-time hashish dealer whose boxing gym was destroyed in the vandalism of the riots. He seems to be the most rational of the three friends, but now that his life’s work has been taken away from him, he will do anything to escape his neighborhood. Saïd, an Arab, seems unwilling to acknowledge the problems of his surroundings except by expressing amazement or incomprehension of them. And Vinz is a Jewish youth who finds a gun that was lost by a police officer during the riots. He is the angriest of the three and does not hesitate to offer violence as a means of releasing his bitterness.

Several aspects of the milieu of these young men require elucidation. In the United States, the suburbs connote a refuge for the middle and upper class outside the problems of an urban environment, whereas in France, the term for suburb, banlieue, suggests an entirely different meaning. Surrounding Paris on all sides, banlieues are planned housing developments for the working classes who can no longer afford to live in the city.

HLMs [habitations à loyer modéré] are the low-rent housing projects in the banlieues. Their inhabitants are primarily immigrant laborers from France’s former colonies in North and West Africa, as well as from Asia. After the Second World War, France, like other European nations, needed help rebuilding the country as an industrial nation and looked to its former colonies for workers. These workers were usually single men who were supposed to stay for only a limited period. In 1974, the borders were closed because of economic difficulties, yet families of previous immigrants could continue to enter, creating an ambiguous condition of entry. The HLMs are filled with families who migrated to France and remained there permanently, as illustrated in La Haine. The forest of concrete apartment towers seen in the film provides an unnatural, oppressive landscape for the inhabitants, which helps to explain their anger and detachment from society. Kassovitz includes shots of the HLMs that remind the viewer of powerful monoliths and prisons from the outside and of cages from the inside.

The banlieues, then, are failed urban settings. The housing is dreadful, and most of the jobs that we see are either illegal (selling drugs or stolen goods) or ephemeral (Hubert’s gymnasium). The schools do not seem to be a powerful presence in the lives of the young: not one of the three principal characters goes to school, even though they seem to be of school age. Kassovitz documents the one commodity that is plentiful in the banlieues: unfilled time. In an interview, the director described the place where the film was made:

in a ‘Cité’, i.e. a typical kind of French suburban housing ghetto where it’s not that unpleasant to live; they even have parks there, and soccer fields ... but it’s a ‘cité’ meaning that 80% of the population and 100% of the young have nothing to do... (Polygram Records web page).

Sarah Sussman
Book Review
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