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La Haine (Criterion Collection) |
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La Haine (Criterion Collection)
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by Criterion
Sales Rank: 9346
Price: $24.99
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When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the international film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentments at their social marginalization slowly simmering until they reach a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
Viewer Reviews
The film's black and white filming assumes an appropriate grittiness. So too the semi-documentary flavour. That violence breeds violence is the despairing story of the depressing society of the housing estates.The establishing image is of a graffitti, to which the film addresses itself. Kassovitz's film follows three young men through twenty-four hours. If the film has lost none of its punch since the mid 90s it is probably due to the reality of those continuing conditions. Racial intolerance and police brutality, the government's reaction to the malaise have only intensified. I felt the sudden zooms were effective and the closeups on the three leads facilitated the message. I liked the scale of the figures against the urabn settings, the stations, the flickering screens, the massive public sculture. The explicit violence is familiar to me. I live in a racially divided town. Police intervention on the streets and the neighbourhood are commonplace. Though the civil diturbances, erupting out of langour and hopelessness, are not as seething, a bomb ticking, as per La Haine. From my tangent, the film was, if anything, a bit soft.
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La Haine (Criterion Collection)
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