Larry Clark's Kids and Mathieu
Kassovitz's Hate, two rough street movies
about what's the matter with kids today, arrived
simultaneously at the Cannes Film Festival last
spring.
Kids suffered from the kind of
sensational publicity buildup that few movies can
survive. The less heavily promoted Hate
made a stronger impression, winning the best
director prize for Kassovitz. Now that the dust
has settled, however, they seem equally showy and
superficial.
Hate takes place in a modern Parisian
ghetto, where a riot breaks out between the police
and several angry young men, including an Arab boy
who is arrested, brutally beaten and sent to a
hospital, where he will most likely die. His three
friends - Jewish Vinz (Vincent Cassel), black
Hubert (Hubert Kounde) and another Arab, Said
(Said Taghmaoui) - spend the next 24 hours dealing
with their frustration and anger over what they
regard as a racially motivated atrocity.
"An Arab in a police station doesn't last an
hour," says one.
One of the cops lost a revolver during the
riot, and once the gun gets into the boys' hands
it's the cause of endless threats and macho
declarations. "The world is yours," declares a
billboard with heavy irony. The "yours" is quickly
changed to "ours."
The treatment of the gun tells us something,
though never quite enough, about the differences
between the three boys. Hubert is the relatively
reasonable one, Vinz the tiresome hothead, Said
the in-betweener, and the actors playing them do
little more than suggest one trait apiece.
Filmed in ostentatiously "real" black and
white, Hate rarely delves beneath its slick
cinema-verite style, which includes a complex zoom
shot that recalls the elaborate disorienting
effects in Jaws and Vertigo. Perhaps
if the brutalized Arab boy had been established as
something more than a victim, his friends'
concerns might have seemed as important as the
hopped-up camerawork.
The most interesting aspect of Hate is
the boyz-n-the-hood treatment of a depressed,
hellish Paris we rarely see in other French films.
It's often alarmingly close to American movies
about gangs and prejudiced lawmen and kids with
too much time on their hands.
One confrontation between the boys and a
policeman is so familiar it begins to suggest the
lead-in to "Gee, Officer Krupke" from West Side
Story. One character wears a sweatshirt that
reads "Elvis shot JFK." Another attacks the
racial-minority status of an Asian grocer. Another
claims "my name's not Rodney King." Edith Piaf may
be heard singing in the background, and the kids
may be speaking another language, but there's
something depressingly universal about this
scenario.
In Kassovitz's first film, 1993's Cafe au
Lait, he played the leading role: a Jewish
bike messenger who explodes when he discovers that
his pregnant West Indian girlfriend has been
sleeping with a sophisticated Muslim. It was so
cute Disney might have remade it as "Two Men and a
Baby."
Disney probably won't be remaking Hate,
but it suffers from a similar inability to take
its characters seriously enough to give them three
dimensions.
From
Film.com
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