Mathieu Kassovitz is a 29-year-old French director who in his first two
films has probed the wound of alienation among France's young outsiders.
His new film ``Hate'' tells the story of three young men--an Arab, an
African and a Jew--who spend an aimless day in a sterile Paris suburb, as
social turmoil swirls around them and they eventually get into a
confrontation with the police. If France is the man falling off the
building, they are the sidewalk.
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. 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.
In America, where for all of our problems, we are long accustomed to
being a melting pot, it is hard to realize how monolithic most European
nations have been--especially France, where Frenchness is almost a cult,
and a political leader like Jean-Marie Le Pen can roll up alarming vote
totals with his anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant diatribes. The French
neo-Nazi right wing lurks in the shadows of ``Hate,'' providing it with an
unspoken subtext for its French audiences. (Imagine how a moviegoer from
Mars would misread a film like ``Driving Miss Daisy'' if he knew nothing
about Southern segregation.)
The three heroes of ``Hate'' are Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Jewish, working
class; Hubert (Hubert Kounde), from Africa, a boxer, more mature than his
friends, and Said (Said Taghmaoui), from North Africa, more lighthearted
than his friends. That they hang out with one another reflects the fact
that in France, friendships are as likely to be based on class as
race.
These characters inhabit a world where much of the cultural furniture
has been imported from America. They use words like ``homeboy.'' Vinz
gives Said a ``killer haircut, like in New York.'' Vinz does a De Niro
imitation (``Who you talkin' to?''). There's break-dancing in the movie.
Perhaps they like U.S. culture because it is not French, and they do not
feel very French, either.
During the course of less than 24 hours, they move aimlessly through
their suburb and take a brief trip to Paris. They have run-ins with the
cops, who try to clear them off a rooftop hangout that has become such a
youth center, it even has its own hot dog stand. They move on the
periphery of riots that have started after the police shooting of an Arab
youth. When his younger sister's school is burned down, Vinz's Jewish
grandmother warns,``You start out like that, you'll end up not going to
temple.''
What underlies everything they do is the inescapable fact that they
have nothing to do. They have no jobs, no prospects, no serious hopes of
economic independence, no money, few ways to amuse themselves except by
hanging out. They are not bad kids, not criminals, not particularly
violent (the boxer is the least violent), but they have been singled out
by age, ethnicity and appearance as probable troublemakers. Treated that
way by the police, they respond--almost whether they want to or not.
As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has grown since his first film. His
black-and-white cinematography camera is alert, filling the frame with
meaning his characters are not aware of. Many French films place their
characters in such picturesque settings--Paris, Nice--that it is easy to
see them as more colorful than real. 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. These are empty vistas of space--architectural deserts--that
flaunt their hostility to the three young men, as if they were designed to
provide no cover.
The film's ending is more or less predictable and inevitable, but
effective all the same. The film is not about its ending. It is not about
the landing, but about the fall. ``Hate'' is, I suppose, a Generation X
film, whatever that means, but more mature and insightful than the
American Gen X movies. In America, we cling to the notion that we have
choice, and so if our Gen X heroes are alienated from society, it is their
choice--it's their ``lifestyle.'' In France, Kassovitz says, it is society
that has made the choice.
From Chicago
Sun-Times
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