All the way down, the soon to be deceased person maintains a momentary positive attitude by repeating to himself, 'so far so good', with a corollary offered by the listener that 'it's not how you fall that matters, it's how you land'. The film is book-ended by an idea submitted as a conversation about a person falling from a high rise window. This story is set in an area of depressing housing projects where the chances of upward mobility doesn't exist, exacerbated by tensions between the police and a diverse population trying to make ends meet.
Being a French film, the city in this case is Paris, but not the Paris one sees in travel brochures. Translated, it means 'Hate', and that emotion is palpable throughout the story of three young men with no direction, no job, and nothing to do with themselves except kill time by hanging around in one section of the city or another. That's the sort of picture "La Haine" is. In many cases, moral equivalency enters the picture, and we're left to distinguish between bad and less bad. In today's world, 'right' often comes up empty handed, and often there's a fine line between differentiating the good from the bad. In a lot of cases, civic and moral dilemmas could often be resolved with right winning out over wrong in the end. Actress Jodie Foster was so impressed with La Haine when she saw it at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival that she helped to arrange American distribution for the film through her production company, Egg Pictures.After watching this film I reflected back on a whole host of films I've seen produced by Warner Brothers back in the Forties and Fifties, having to do with the subject of poverty and how that can lead to crime and lost lives. However, what they don't know is that Vinz picked it up and has it in his possession, and when Vinz, Hubert, and Said get into a scuffle with a group of racist skinheads, the circumstances seem poised for tragedy. One day, a street riot breaks out after police seriously injure an Arab student the three friends are arrested and questioned, and it is learned that a policeman lost a gun in the chaos. They hang out and wander the streets as a way of filling their days and are sometimes caught up in frequent skirmishes between the police and other disaffected youth. Vinz (Vincent Cassel), who is Jewish, Hubert (Hubert Kounde), who is Black, and Said (Said Taghmaoui), who is Arabic, are young men from the lower rungs of the French economic ladder they have no jobs, few prospects, and no productive way to spend their time. While to most outsiders Paris seems the very picture of beauty and civility, France has had a long and unfortunate history of intolerance toward outsiders, and this powerful drama from filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz takes an unblinking look at a racially diverse group of young people trapped in the Parisian economic and social underclass.
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