Mathieu Kassovitz
L'Odio

La haine: the European rap film as seen through the eyes of someone who is not a rapper.

Cinema must go down onto the street. There are moments, places, characters, passions, and emotions that must be captured there and imprinted onto film.

The Italians taught us this after the war. It was time to say no more to the white telephone cinema. Then the French followed, from the late '50s onwards. No more exclusivity for sound stages, studio shootings, interiors.

And others like them, in the last century, before Garrone and the sails of Scampia. Among them, in Paris in the '90s, is Mathieu Kassovitz, a Frenchman of Hungarian descent, who takes this lesson to heart and makes a generational film: La Haine, the hatred. In this film, his gaze observes some lives turned upside down by the climate of tension between the police and the residents of a Parisian suburb. On the street.

On the street, he observes urban guerrilla actions, records words and sounds, captures in black and white glimpses of urban landscapes, but above all, he captures the faces and gazes of the observers: many, many close-ups are dedicated to the listeners, the spectators of the actions. Finally, he captures the eyes of Said, who, dismayed, watch the last piece of a domino that was set in motion twenty hours earlier fall. An hour and a half earlier, the film had opened on these same closed eyes of Said.

The domino. Or it is the story of a domino set in motion, whose pieces fall one after the other. The first piece of our story indeed fell during a riot: here, the clashes between the police and the rioters had caused an increase in tension, the coma of one of the rioters, Abdel, and the loss of a gun by a police officer.

Any reference to actual events and/or real people is purely coincidental and independent of the authors' intentions, appears after the end credits, however, these are actual events: during a police custody on April 6, 1993, Makom M’Bowol, a 17-year-old boy, died in the 18th arrondissement of Paris inside a police station due to a gunshot fired from Inspector Pascal Compain's gun. This would be followed by days of violent clashes between the police and people protesting after Makomé’s death.

The police officer's gun is now in Vinz's hands, and with the gun, Vinz imagines avenging Abdel. Vinz is Jewish and is the protagonist of the story, with him, Said, North African, and Hubert, Black. The film follows them during their Parisian wanderings during which the three will not see the domino pieces fall one after the other, caught, as they are, in a whirlwind of emotions: they are young, fickle, volcanic, and angry; they are direct, spontaneous, and above all impulsive.

• Hey, where did you leave Said and Hubert? - An acquaintance asks Vinz.
• Forget it, those two really pissed me off tonight.
• But is it possible that you three are always pissed off? - concludes the first.

Impulsive, pissed off, and scared.

Recommended: For (almost) everyone. The twenty-seven years of age are not felt at all.

Not recommended: For those who stop at "long live the rule of law and the hard fist." For those who think "the problem of the suburbs." For those who think "rap is violent and rude" but don't want to see the story of integration on the other side of the coin.