By Walker Anderson

As I ventured into the stacks this week to review another film out of Magill’s eclectic collection, I decided to go for a higher class of movie. I found the perfect candidate: "La Haine," a movie with an obscure cast, shot in black-and-white, and in another language (French)—all the right ingredients for an art house critical darling. I hardly expected this film to be so effective, disturbing, tragic, and, most surprisingly, hilarious.

"La Haine" is set in Paris, but not the Paris of romantic bistros or posh art museums. The Eiffel Tower appears in only one poetic shot, far off in the distance, completely disconnected from the protagonists’ lives. The Paris our characters occupy is one of poverty and injustice, where lower-class families, many of them immigrants from Africa, are forced into cramped housing and face abuse from the police.

The film starts with jarring footage of a street altercation pitting the city’s youth against police officers in full riot gear. The violence, however, ends after the opening credits, and the film focuses on the day after the riot, using the aftermath as a backdrop for the troubling moral dilemmas facing the protagonists.

Each of the three main characters are well-developed, bolstered by towering performances by the young actors. Vincent Cassel plays Vinz, a hothead gangster-wannabe. As of the riot, Vinz has somehow acquired a handgun and has vowed that if his friend (a hospitalized victim of police beatings) dies, he will shoot a cop in retaliation. The central question is whether or not Vinz will be able to go through with it, and the film keeps you guessing until the end. Cassel plays this part with bravura, creating a portrait of seething rage with just enough vulnerability to suggest his tough-guy attitude is just a front.

Rounding out the trio are Hubert (Hubert Kounde) and Saïd (Saïd Tagmaoui), both of African descent. Hubert is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Vinz, always the cool-headed one talking his friends down. He is strongly introverted, and in many ways the most devastating character. He’s first introduced boxing at a punching bag in a gym devastated by the riot (a gym, it turns out, in which he has spent much of life). Hubert is a character watching his world crumble, dreaming of a better life but with no means of reaching it. Saïd is a charmingly naïve soul, full of life and humor, who gets along with everyone and negotiates between Hubert and Vinz’s frequently conflicting viewpoints.

There’s a lot going on in this film, and it defies any attempt to label one simple theme. It examines, in part, the relationship between violence and the media, which could easily be heavy-handed, but is handled here with grace. In one early scene, Vinz reenacts the classic Taxi Driver “You talkin’ to me?” speech, with just the right combination of conviction and confusion to render it both chilling and darkly humorous. Much later, when Vinz is left shaken by an encounter with a Russian roulette-playing coke addict, he retreats to the comforting violence of the local movie theater, where he looks on with boredom at the gunfights onscreen.

Technically, the movie is a marvel, including beautiful shots such as a sweeping crane shot over their housing development and another stolen straight out of Vertigo. Every shot is crammed with life, from the ordinary people walking around in the background to the inspiring billboard messages (“The world is yours!”) uncomfortably juxtaposed with the squalor. Strange characters wander in and out of the story, from the coked-out psychopath mentioned above to a cheery old man who tells a strangely off-putting story about trying to defecate in the Siberian wilderness (I can’t explain. Just see the movie.)

Late in the film, a group of skinheads tries to terrorize Hubert and Saïd. Vinz saves the day by pulling out his gun and threatening them. What follows is the most dramatic scene in the movie, a standoff where the tables are turned as Vinz holds one pleading skinhead in his sights. Hubert, the voice of reason, has been diffusing Vinz’s violent tendencies up to this point, but here invites Vinz to kill—arguing that there may be good or bad cops, but there’s no such thing as a good skinhead. Suddenly all bets are off, the moral center of the film is in doubt, and a life hangs in the balance between Vinz’s harsh exterior and his conscience. Of course, I won’t ruin what comes next, or how the movie ends, except to say that the shocking ending grimly suggests that the cycle of violence may never end, and the last shot will leave you breathless.

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