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La Haine
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La Haine (“Hate”)
is a very compelling drama, remarkable on many levels. It has an off-beat,
provocative energy, veering consistently between tasteless, vulgar glee and a
grimly tragic social consciousness. It’s intensely topical, concerning the
violent conflicts between police and the community in a horrid, rundown,
suburban centre of France – a banlieue in the commune of Chanteloup-les-Vignes. This community is multi-cultural and
multi-ethnic, mixing Jewish, Arabic and Algerian communities (among others).
There are three main characters – Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé)
and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) – three youths who stand for these various social
groupings in angry alliance against the police “pigs”.
But
this is not – I am very glad to report – a neat social-issue movie with
emblematic characters, clearly marked conflicts, and wish-fulfilment
resolutions. It’s more vibrant and messier than any simple sociological schema –
and, in an intriguing way, resistant, rousing and life-affirming precisely
because of that chaos factor. I think this is true of La Haine even when it goes bombastic and fatalistic like a Geoffrey
Wright special (Romper Stomper [1992] or Metal Skin [1995]), playing on an all-pervasive
sense of dread, social breakdown and imminent urban apocalypse.
One
of the best strategies of La Haine is
that, for long and captivating stretches, it’s easy to lose track of its
somewhat alarmist social agenda. This happens because we, and the film, get
very interested in just following Vinz, Hubert & Saïd around. They are completely
pumped-up – pumped with rage and frustration, naturally, but also with less
socially determined energies: adrenalin, wild humour, and a desperation not to
be bored. These three are on a headlong, everyday adventure: from their suburb
into the Paris centre and back again, over the course of a day and night. We
see them stealing, breaking into cars, barging in on people and places, looking
for things to do – trying to kill time.
In
other words, they’re the kind of figures familiar from a particularly vivid and
jagged kind of teen movie – the JD (juvenile delinquent) film. I’m thinking of
brashly energetic films like Over the
Edge (1979) with Matt Dillon, or startling French movies such as
Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Sound and Fury (1988) and Patricia Mazuy’s Travolta et moi (1994), or (from Australia, in
a more punk vein) Going Down (1983). In none of these films is a certain
social conscience or social concern entirely absent; what complicates the
social critique, however, and really brings it alive is a certain intense
emotional identification on the filmmaker’s part with the outlaw, smashing-out
energy of these fine young delinquent heroes and heroines.
La Haine is directed
by Matthieu Kassovitz; it’s his second feature after the comedy romance of Métisse (aka Café au lait, 1993). He is unafraid to convey his social themes by raiding
every one of this favourite cinematic styles. He borrows the crazy camera
moves, kinetic editing and manic ticking clocks of Martin Scorsese. He uses freewheeling
actor improvisations, caught in long, bumpy, mobile takes that have travelled
(more or less) from the American films of John Cassavetes through to the French
films of Maurice Pialat or Cyril Collard’s extraordinary Savage Nights (1992), and then back to the American films of Nick
Gomez (New Jersey Drive, 1995). And,
being a hip, young rapper (as the French media like to portray him), Kassovitz
also obligingly steals a few agonising, violent clinches from Quentin Tarantino movies. In fact, the whole
narrative set-up of this film – one of the three JDs gets a cop’s gun, and so
you wait forever for that damn thing to go off in the least expected and worst
possible way – is in itself a black comedy reminiscent of the suspense build-up
in much Tarantino.
The
combination of all these influences with the content of the film really sparks.
In a way, I think Kassovitz bridges the British cinema of social conscience –
Ken Loach, for instance – and the more purely movie-loving sector of
contemporary French cinema, such as the high-flying, anarchic poetry of Leos
Carax.
A
lot of La Haine’s power comes through
the soundtrack. When reviewers say that, they are usually referring only to the
music (and maybe even to that music on a detachable, autonomous CD, rather than
how it functions inside the movie itself!); but music is just one part of a total,
well-designed soundtrack. As writer-director-musician Philip Brophy has often
said: a film is 100% image and 100% sound (do the math!). Or, at least, it
should be. Here, it is the complete weave of voices, noise effects, and various
treatments of bits of music that matters. The sound mix is amazing.
La Haine has
that kind of intricate complexity. Not a fussy kind of intricacy – rather, it
has an immediate, visceral impact, which is why a lot of viewers won’t even
quite catc what’s materially going on in the soundreack. And concentrating on
reading the subtitles won’t help you with really hearing this film, either. Because, often, the approximate sense of
the words being uttered by the characters is less significant and less
impactful than the entire, harsh sensuality of the constant, modulating stream
of noise, music, and vocal growls or hisses.
A
few examples of this sound work. La Haine begins with newsreel video footage, under the rapid-fire credits, of riots
between police and the people who live in this rundown banlieue. On the soundtrack, we hear – in the conventionally full,
movie-theme way, Bob Marley’s song “Burnin’ and Lootin’”. A reggae song, and it
has that characteristically easy lilt which belies the savage realities that
are reflected upon in its lyrics – “burning all illusions tonight”, as the song
promises. Once the credits end, and the first image of the fiction proper
starts, the film cuts to complete silence. We see Saïd standing solitary and
anxious in a courtyard. The camera moves in closer; now we see that he has his
eyes shut. When he opens them, the sound of this urban space floods into the
movie: a fantastic, hard poetic effect. Then there’s a dislocating cut in the
image track, and the image is now positioned right around at the back of Saïd’s
head. The camera lifts, and we view what has been opposite Saïd all along: a
large phalanx of attack cops at the ready. As the film surveys this grim vigil,
we hear a faint, distant, reverbarating echo, almost unrecognisable now,
of “Burnin’ and Lootin’”. The effect of
this “re-placed” musical reference is unforgettably chilling.
It
should be clear, just from these opening moments, how sound is related to the internal
perceptions of the characters. “Subjective” sound of this type – Krzysztof
Kieślowski did a lot for this dubious cause in his somewhat overwrought Three Colours: Blue (1993) – has swiftly
become a new fad or affectation in the film industry at all its levels, from
training school to blockbuster. Even more tellingly, however, in the case of La Haine, the sound mix captures what
it’s like to experience external sound within a specific, physical space. This
architectural, urban space that becomes a kind of theatre-in-the-round for the playing
out of public, communal tensions. Kassovitz goes further in evoking these
physical sensations of the urban environment than Spike Lee did in Do the Right Thing (1989).
There’s
another extraordinary sequence – one that most people do tend to “hear”, since sound
is its focal point, its very subject. There is a young, wired-up DJ at the
window of his small apartment in a block of flats. This spectacle reminded me
of the terrific American teen movie, Pump
Up the Volume (1990) – maybe the kid’s parents are right in the next room,
trying to watch TV. He’s even more like the radio DJ in Do the Right Thing, whose broadcasts become an integral part of the
material texture of the street, indeed the whole block, in the ghetto where he
dwells. At any rate, the guy in La Haine – it’s actually the famous, Moroccan-born DJ Cut Killer aka Anouar Hajoui – sets up huge speakers
facing out of his window into a courtyard, and then begins doing a lightning
mix of various records: a sample of Édith Piaf singing “No, je ne regrette rien”
is ironically collided with “Sound of da police” by
KRS-One and “Police” by hip hop rap group NTM, forming the sonic collage “Nique
la Police”. And as it plays, the camera takes to the sky (somehow!) and surveys
the buildings, the tops of trees.
It’s
exhilarating and scary, lyrical and despairing, all at once. The further away
the camera gets, the more the music booms in the distance, melting into the
geography of this urban space. Finally, we get a shot of two of our heroes far
away, looking up to the sky as they bask in now faint aural trace of this
stylish ode to revolt. “Killer!”, they remark admiringly, as they often do in La Haine.
Sometimes
(as the French saying goes) Kassovitz’s film fell from my eyes. There’s one
rotten scene, resembling something straight out of the Aussie movie Petersen (1974), where our JD friends
disrupt a chic, souless, after-midnight, art gallery opening – and what frightfully
transgressive behaviour they indulge in! More generally, the dynamic, volatile
style occasionally gets a bit slick, MTV-like, tricky and exhibitionistic for
its own sake. That made me wonder, finally, about the social content of the
piece. Sometimes there’s a touch of something a bit phony and fantasised – and
I’m not just talking about the absurd subtitles obviously prepared for the
American market, which deform the cultural specificity of French youth slang
expressions (a common problem of translation, in its widest sense).
I
wondered, at times, how well Kassovitz really knows this world that he shows.
The scenes of his three heroes reflecting on politics, revolution and social
change ring a little false and hollow. There’s something cautious, politically
too-correct in the way that Kassovitz makes Hubert, his central black character,
the most radically aware, and the least prone to aggro violence. And, amid the
overwhelmingly violent, trigger-edge world of the film, I found the absence of
sexual violence (in fact, anything at all related to sexuality) odd –
particularly in comparison to a recent film that is, in some respects, similar
to it, namely Larry Clark’s Kids (1995).
But
these are minor criticisms, finally. La
Haine is among the genuine “event films” of the 1990s.
MORE Kassovitz: Gothika © Adrian Martin March 1996 |
