La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995) and City of God (Meirelles, 2002)

La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) is a black and white drama/suspense social realism film set in the rural and lower class French suburbs. The film follows three young men, Vinz, Said and Hubert and their struggles with living in France with a racist and oppressive police force.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002) is a crime-drama film set in a lower class slum of Rio de Janerio in the 1960s. The film is told from the viewpoint of a boy named Rocket, who demonstrates the violence and desperation in the slums.

To compare, both of these films are within the social realism genre and are loosely based on true events. 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 and City of God depicts drug abuse, violent crime and society wanting to escape the slums in that time.

Throughout La Haine, the theme of class is always present. This is shown by the main character Vinz 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 sees this from a POV shot. This suggests that the audience is the middle-class society, looking down on Vinz as he is working-class. The audience learns 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.

This compares with in City of God, when Rocket gets a job working for a newspaper. In these scenes the audience can see predominantly white people, dressed smartly in suits and come from a middle-class background. This is shown by a contrast of colour in shots. Everything in the newspaper office is white, and looks sterile and clean, this contrasts with where Rocket lives in the slums, as they are dark and dirty. This creates the idea that Rocket stands out from the other people in the office, and when the reporters find out that Rocket has access to City of God, they use him to their selfish advantage, not caring about the consequences it may have on him.

Another theme that is present throughout both films is masculinity. In La Haine, this is shown when Asterix shows his power and dominance in the scene when the boys are at his apartment 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. The audience gets the sense that Vinz was trying to prove to the others in the room that he is just as experienced as Asterix, but it just ended up in him representing himself in a negative way due to his aggression.

In City of God, masculinity is shown through the younger ‘runts’ aspiring to be like the Tender Trio and Li’l Ze. City of God created a cause and effect cycle, as when Li’l Ze was a boy, he aspired to be just like the Tender Trio, and loot and rob the local businesses using weapons. So when he got his turn, all of the children in the next generation then aspired to be just like him, in hope to use their own weapons and so they started looting local bakeries to prove they were ‘men’.  Also in City of God, Li’l Ze caught a group of runts as they were planning to hold up another business to be like him, the majority of the boys got away, but two were left cornered by him. So to prove his masculinity, Li’l Ze made one of his boys that worked for him, Steak, shoot one of them in either the hand or the foot. This was a brutal task to complete; as Steak was only young, but it was the only way he could prove to Li’l Ze that he was worthy of being by his side.

Alternatively, another theme in both films is how the setting of the films is portrayed. La Haine is set in Paris, which is a city known for its beauty in the world, but it is filmed so that it doesn’t look appealing to the audience. This creates a sense of gritty and social realism, as it doesn’t paint the Hollywood picture of a location, it is stripped back and so lets the audience see a realistic setting of where the characters would live. This is why I think the editing to black and white was effective, as it shows no colour, which emphasises how bleak their lives really are.

City of God is set in Rio de Janerio, a city also known for its beauty, as it is filled with colour and buzzing with life. But yet in this film the audience only gets a sense of the lower class slums, which predominantly consist of dismal and dangerous activity. Both films depict their settings in a negative way to reflect the themes and genre of the films.