La Haine Review: Kassovitz’s 1995 Cannes Winner Still Cuts at 31

Mathieu Kassovitz won Best Director at Cannes in 1995 for La Haine, and the prize has aged into something closer to a warning. The film follows three friends through roughly twenty hours in a poor immigrant neighbourhood outside Paris, after a local man named Abdel Ichaha is gravely injured in police custody. It is a social thriller with a gun in it, and the gun is not the point.

Trailer, via BFI.

Vinz, Hubert and Saïd

Vinz is played by Vincent Cassel. He is young, Jewish, quick to rage, and he wants revenge for Abdel. He hates police officers and privately copies Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, posturing at his bathroom mirror.

Hubert, played by Hubert Koundé, is an Afro-French Christian, a boxer and a small-time drug dealer. He wants out of the banlieue. The riots destroyed his boxing gymnasium.

Saïd, played by Saïd Taghmaoui, is a young North African Muslim. He is the mediator between Vinz and Hubert, who argue constantly. A police officer who knows Saïd’s brother helps secure his release after he is taken into custody, and the film does not say what, if anything, came of it.

Twenty Hours in Chanteloup-les-Vignes

The film opens on news footage of riots in a banlieue in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, near Paris. Abdel’s injury is the cause. The unrest grows into a siege of the local police station, and during it a police officer’s revolver goes missing.

Vinz finds the .44 Magnum. He says he will kill a police officer if Abdel dies. Hubert disapproves. Vinz takes the gun anyway.

A Day, Then a Night

The three drift. They try to visit Abdel at the hospital and police stop them. They refuse to leave, and Saïd is taken into custody. The film does not say what he was held on or how the matter was resolved beyond his release.

The Title Comes From Hubert

The film’s name is not Kassovitz’s invention. It comes from a line Hubert speaks: “La haine attire la haine!” Hatred breeds hatred. That is the whole argument of the film, and Kassovitz never lets it sit as a slogan.

The tagline puts it another way: “How far you fall doesn’t matter, it’s how you land…”

What the Camera Does

Kassovitz wrote, co-edited and directed La Haine, and the control shows. The film runs 98 minutes. It is a drama by genre, a social thriller by temperament, and it wastes almost none of its time.

The three leads carry it. Cassel plays Vinz as a pose that keeps slipping into real danger. Koundé gives Hubert the film’s weight, the one man who can see the trap and cannot get out of it. Taghmaoui’s Saïd is the funniest and the most exposed.

Why It Still Lands

La Haine is thirty-one years old and reads as current. That is not a compliment to the film. It is a measure of how little the conditions it recorded have moved.

The structure is simple: three friends, one day, one missing gun, one injured man in intensive care. Kassovitz does not explain the banlieue to outsiders and does not ask for sympathy. He puts the camera in the stairwells and on the rooftops and lets the day run out.

The weakest stretch is the middle, where the drifting loses shape and the arguments between Vinz and Hubert repeat. It is a small complaint against a film this controlled.

The ending is where everything the film has built arrives at once: the gun, the hatred, the three men’s different roads out.

Rotten Tomatoes puts La Haine at 96%, a critical score of 9.6/10. That is the right number. This is one of the essential films of the 1990s, and its Best Director prize at Cannes was not a courtesy.

1990s films · French cinema · La Haine · Mathieu Kassovitz · movie review · Vincent Cassel