To cap off the year, let’s look to France for a modern classic from ’95 that, save for an absence of smartphones, still rings as true now as it did in the nineties—from Mathieu Kassovitz, it’s La Haine.
The film is set amid the backdrop of riots and tensions in the banlieue suburbs around Paris, with all the heavy-handed measures of the French police leading to escalations—and, in this case, the resentment of three young men in the aftermath. Played by Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde, and Saïd Taghmaoui, while each has their own somewhat different temperament, all are still surrounded by the cycles of nihilism and violence about them.
The film is shot in black and white with a noticeable DV-tape feel to the quality—which for the subject suffices, giving it a pretty raw and down to earth feel. That’s not to say that there isn’t any flair to the cinematography—there’s some impressive shots panning between apartment blocks, or even directly facing a car being driven down streets, which aren’t the easiest to pull off in this time for a relatively low budget flick.
But of course what makes it stand out is the all too naturalistic feel of it—there’s an ongoing plot, of course, but there’s parts of our leads goofing about, conversing on random tangents, or doing all the things young people then might do to keep themselves entertained in the era before wifi. There’s all the mood whiplashes you might get from that, as in real life—the last act has them bumble through Paris in the night, with a bemusing stint in an art gallery followed not long after by something a lot more intense.
Still, even without the social media fixations you’d get now, there’s no shying away from matters of police brutality, profiling, and, especially with Vincent’s character, what I guess we’d now call toxic masculinity—there’s the ongoing threat of a police revolver swiped by our characters treated almost as both totem and toy. And when there’s a scene of him copying the lead from Taxi Driver, well, that does spell the tone for what’s to follow.
With overlapping and loose dialogue, with all the colorful metaphors the French language can provide, you can see how La Haine struck a chord with its nicely done realistic feel now and then. There’s not exactly been any loss of applicability with it in France and elsewhere—we even have our characters comment on a Le Pen, just not the one you may think. At the same time, there is at least something to be said of our main trio of their own ethnic backgrounds bought together—even if, ultimately, by destructive circumstance.
A decade later we had a much more stylized and over the top look at such social issues in the banlieues with District 13, courtesy of Luc Besson—with a lot more parkour involved. La Haine is a reminder, of course, of that time before smartphones and our digital media could capture strife on the streets—and in that regard, at least, such filmmaking has truly been delegated to the people. That much, at least, we can say we have done in the years since—and in the years to come…
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