In La Haine, Cassel’s character delivers a spot-on diagnosis of what’s ailing his nation: “It’s about a society on its way down, and as it falls, it keeps telling itself, ‘So far so good, so far so good, so far so good.’”īesides shining a spotlight on the tensions between shady cops and brazen youths – and introducing one of the most bat-shit-cray, scantily clad cokehead characters in cinematic history (Astérix, or “Snoopy” for English subtitle readers) – the film proved enormously successful in exporting French culture abroad. Riled by the April 1993 murder of a 17-year-old from Zaïre while handcuffed and in police custody, Kassovitz sought to expose the racial and class divisions that were tearing French society apart. Kassovitz wasn’t the first filmmaker to chip away at Paris’ romanticised City of Lights veneer, but he proved the most effective at translating the anger of suburban youths subjected to institutionalised racism and police brutality. IT TORE THE RÉPUBLIQUE APART AND REBUFFED PARIS' STUFFY IMAGE
Clearly, this “malaise of the ghetto” (as a posh gallery owner in La Haine sniffily puts it) remains as explosive as ever.
Watching the opening credits, as Bob Marley’s “Burnin’ and Lootin”’ plays out over documentary footage of Paris riots, viewers will draw parallels with the violent clashes which beset the French capital’s banlieues in 2005, 20. But one thing’s for sure: this year’s fest failed to deliver a scandal on a par with the furore surrounding Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003), Lars von Trier’s Hitlergate moment in 2011, or French cops turning their backs to Mathieu Kassovitz when he won best director prize in 1995 for La Haine, his searing indictment of French society’s exclusion of disenfranchised youths from the Paris projects (or cités).Īs Kassovitz’s visceral debut celebrates its 20th anniversary, what’s most striking about this 24-hour window into the lives of three ethnically diverse male protagonists – Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Hubert (Hubert Koundé) – is that the shockingly gritty fable has lost none of its potency. As the dust begins to settle on the French Riviera, film buffs are fighting over whether first-time director László Nemes was robbed of the Palme d’Or for his highly praised Holocaust drama, Son of Saul.
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