La Haine (1995)
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
After a chaotic night of rioting in a marginal suburb of Paris, three young friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, wander around unoccupied waiting for news about the state of health of a mutual friend who has been seriously injured when confronting the police.
4 connections found
View:
4 films that influenced La Haine
What critics say influenced La Haine
That film, inspired by Spike Lee's “She's Gotta Have It,” was more of a comedy, but with “Hate,” also about characters who are not ethnically French, he has painted a much darker vision.
But the concrete suburbs where Kassovitz sets his film (the same sterile settings that were home to Eric Rohmer's cosmically different “ Boyfriends and Girlfriends ” in 1987) give back nothing.
Vinz, who fancies himself to be Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle character from "Taxi Driver," has found a gun (which was lost by a riot policeman) and is now looking to get revenge.
Adopting more snippets of American culture than French, the trio uses L.A. gangster slang, break-dance, or act out De Niro's classic "You talking to me" speech from Taxi Driver .
Mathieu Kassovitz, who did the film "Cafe au Lait", if you remember, does a terrific job on both the directing and screenwriting fronts here.
Kassovitz, who also directed "Cafe Au Lait," is up to the task of matching his actors.
In Kassovitz's first film, “Cafe au Lait” (1994), he told the story of a young woman from the Caribbean who summons her two boyfriends--one African, one Jewish--to announce that she is pregnant.