Analysis of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)

La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) is a black and white crime-drama film which focuses on the social realism set in the French suburbs which are rural and low class. It follows three young men, Vinz, Said and Hubert and their struggles with living in France with a racist and oppressive police force. The themes that are present during the film are revenge, friendship, poverty, escapism, police brutality, class and masculinity. La Haine is based on true events of the death of an 18-year-old black youth who was shot during interrogation by the police in 1992. It was a low-budget film of €2,590,000 which contains lots of dialogue, few special effects and unknown actors at that time.

Throughout the film, the screen changes displaying only the time in a large font, this lets the audience know that all the events in the film take place in the same day. La Haine shows approximately 19 consecutive hours in the lives of Vinz, Hubert and Said who are victims of their own circumstances. Diversity and multiculturalism is a major theme throughout the film, as the 3 main protagonists all come from different backgrounds. Vinz is Jewish, Said is Arabic and Hubert is black. This suggests that they are accepting of each other and they have created a unit against the police officers who were racist and violent to their friend. La Haine focuses on real life issues of drugs and violence in Paris. La Haine was filmed in colour, but in post-production stages was edited to black and white. This was a stylistic choice, which creates the atmosphere of social and gritty realism as the audience can focus on the corrupt issues between the working class in France, so the audience are not focusing on the beautiful setting that France can portray.

The title sequence of the film features the song ‘Burnin and Lootin’ by Bob Marley. This creates a clear link as the title sequence is made up of clips from French riots. Within these they show a French society protesting in the streets against the police. The images are graphic and show people tipping cars, looting stores and burning fires. This leads straight into a news report of riots that have happened; the news anchor explains that the riots started after a police officer had beaten up a youth he was questioning, Abdel Ichaha, who is now in critical condition in hospital.

The film starts at 10:38am, as a young boy, Said, defaces a police officers van by writing ‘Baise la police’ (screw the police). The audience learns that Said is a delinquent. He stands in the street calling up to his friend, Vinz, and agitates the neighbours around him. Said goes into Vinz’s room to wake him up, using violent threats to him and his family, he then proceeds to ask ‘Where’s the dope?’. Said and Vinz head to the gym, to find that in the riots it has been trashed, this is where the audience meet the third character, Hubert.

Vinz describes the riots as ‘War against the pigs’ which tells the audience that he has no respect for authority and tells Hubert how in the riots they’ve told him he can go to prison or do community service. Vinz doesn’t seem to be bothered about the thought of doing time in prison, as he says most of his friends have anyway. The three boys meet another gang of lads, who tell them ‘A pig lost his gun last night’ and they were trying to work out what gun it was. The boys who are together on the rooftop are represented as lower class delinquents, as when one of the young boys sees the Mayor approaching, they proceed to throw stones at him and shout ‘Hey, screw your mother, you son of a bitch’. This further supports the point that none of the boys have any respect for authority as they then continue to argue with the police when they are told that they can’t be on the roof of the building. The clothing the boys wear suggests they are from a low class and rural area, as they are stereotypical clothes that might be worn by black youths.

Then at 12:43pm, the boys are approached by a reporter who asked them if they took part in the riots. They begin to harass her by saying ‘Do we look like thugs? Get out of the car’ and threw a stone at her car whilst arguing with her to stop filming them. Said and Vinz refer to the reporter as a ‘bastard’ and ‘tart’ which could suggest that they have no respect for women. This is a key scene as the news crew are ‘looking down’ on the boys. Vinz describes their behaviour as treating them like they belonged in a zoo, which supports the theme of racism and social exclusion.

A tracking shot of the camera leads the audience down a dark corridor, which shows Vinz pulling out a gun to ‘shoot’. This creates a clear link as this is the police officers gun that was lost in the riots, and the shallow focus creates a suspenseful effect as the audience now know that Vinz and the boys are planning revenge. Vinz wants to be powerful and has a newfound means to gain the respect he deserves, by making a vow to kill a police officer.

In the scene where Vinz, Hubert and Said attempt to gain entry to the middle-class block of flats where they hope to meet Asterix, Vinz is given the task to try and go inside because he is white. This shows how in France, the protagonists are very aware of who may be looking at their ethnicity and social standing. Vinz aggression escalates rapidly when they cannot find Asterix, and the audience see this from a POV shot. This suggests that the audience are the middle-class society, looking down on Vinz as he is working-class. The audience learn that Asterix’s apartment is big and wealthy, with a long banquet table and a cabinet filled with ornaments. This creates a contrast to the apartments the audience saw on the estate at the beginning of the film, which were the boy’s homes. Asterix shows his power and dominance in this scene as he screws over Vinz with the gun he found. Asterix pretends to act as if he is about to shoot himself with the loaded gun, to which Vinz panics and reacts negatively. As a result, Asterix and Vinz have an argument which then unfolds that the gun was never loaded and emphasises the fact that Vinz is inexperienced in what he is trying to do; this could be foreshadowing to the end of the film when Vinz had the chance to murder a skinhead but chooses to let him go, and then gets himself killed.