Part of Midnight Movies
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with this gritty, unsettling and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France — specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) — Jewish, African and Arab, respectively — give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, LA HAINE is a landmark of 1990s French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.