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The film has little plot as such: most of the time, we get to know our three central characters. La Haine takes place in less than twenty-four hours, during which the three take a trip to the city centre and miss the train home. When real riots broke out in France, ten years after this film was made, it seemed uncannily prescient. It’s not the fall that kills but the landing. The central image of the film is of a man falling from a high building and saying “Okay so far” because he has yet to hit the ground.
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Every so often director Kassovitz cuts to a time caption. La Haine (Hate) may seem schematic at first in having its three lead characters from three different ethnic groups, but it’s quite clear that they are equally “other”, especially to the white skinheads they meet more than once. Instead of well-heeled middle-classness (with more than a hint of complacency) you have the areas where society fractures – the sink estates populated by the underclass, the areas where you don’t go out alone after dark, and where you have no business going to as a visitor. As an Arab boy lies in a critical condition, the atmosphere is tense for friends Vinz (Vincent Cassel), a white Jew, Hubert (Hubert Koundé) who is Black, and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), who is of Arab descent.Īs Keith Reader points out in an essay originally from Sight & Sound in 1995 and which is reprinted in this edition’s booklet, to the French “banlieue” carries quite a different connotation to that which “suburbia” would have to the English. In a suburb of Paris, it’s the day after a riot. Hardly dated at all, La Haine gets a twenty-fifth anniversary Blu-ray edition from the BFI.