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On it’s release, director Mathieu Kasovitz insisted that La Haine should be interpreted as an anti-police film. In your view, is this the main point of the film?
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La Haine is a youth film made in 1995 and is set in the Banlieue, the French equivalent of a British council estate and the centre for crime, gun culture, drugs and extreme poverty. The film centres on 3 youth members of the Banlieue: Vinz, Hubert and Sayid, and looks at their problems from their perspective and their reactions to these problems. This indeed gives the film a strong anti-police message. But I do not believe this to be the central point of the film. I will explore the main point and how it is expressed throughout the film. The anti-police message is a big part of the film. The kids of the Banlieue blame the system for their misfortunes: poverty, crime and no hope. This is emphasised by an inter-texulisation of Taxi Driver, when Vinz stares in a mirror pretending he has a gun and echoing the “you talkin’ to me” statement of Taxi Driver. This is because the characters of both films are existentially lost and are living in an urban hell. They have no real purpose in life. Therefore, striking out at the police is a way of striking out at the system that has put them in their predicament. This is expressed in many ways during the film. The film starts with one young person confronting a team of riot police claiming them to be murderers, as they have guns and the rioters only have rocks. This suggests that the police are bullies, ganging up on “defenceless young protesters. A riot is then shown through accelerated montage, shot in a documentary style: a form of verisimilitude, a realism operator. This is done using techniques such as shaky cam. It gives the riot scenes a sense of gritty realism so that it can suggest that the shots of police brutality are “real”: a part of everyday life. Another scene shows an act of rebellion against the system through graffiti. We get a shot/reverse shot of Sayid on his own and a line of policemen staring at what we think is Sayid. This lulls the audience into a false sense of security, as the film is following conventional film editing rules. But this sense of normality is shattered as the camera crabs along the line of staring police and we see Sayid at the back of their van spray-painting “Fuck the police” onto it. This shatters the illusion of the police upholding the law and shows that rebellion is occurring. When the 3 protagonists visit the hospital to see their wounded friend Abdel, the police won’t let them through. The police are only doing their job but are represented as uncaring, not allowing concerned kids through to see their seriously wounded friend. This suggests that the police are unjustly violent as they grab Sayid and take him away for refusing to go. When he is released, Sayid states that an “Arab wouldn’t last a second in a police station”, suggesting that the police are racist, a notion that is further enhanced by the arrest of Sayid and Hubert outside Snoopy’s block of flats. They are taken to the station where they are beaten, strangled, sexually threatened and racially abused by comments such as “ Arab son-of-a-bitch”.
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