Mathieu Kassovitz
L'Odio

THE REVIEW

"So far, so good, so far, so good… the problem is not the fall, it's the landing"

"Burnin' and lootin'" by Bob Marley starts, the film unfolds in the logorrheic nonsense of Said, who in real life is Said and in the controversial maturity of Houbert who in real life is Houbert and in the irascibility of Vinz, who before becoming Mr. Bellucci, in real life was Vincent. It's a punch in the stomach, absolute, definitive, essential like the director's choice of black and white.

Social but apolitical, because the main issue is now, here even if urgency runs on clock time. Everything collapses, and an acquaintance on the brink of death becomes a pretext to take a hand from a lost gun.

It touches you closely, involves and shakes you even if the rhythm is not always very high. The caricatures interspersed with the main characters lighten the film's atmosphere, but everything revolves around the recklessness of revenge as social retaliation; if you can't handle the dog, you settle scores with the teeth, and if they can kill one of us, we must kill one of them, no matter which one. In the end, in the fight among the poor, everyone ends up defeated, and the unspoken, that final shot on the dark screen… it doesn't matter who kills whom, it hardly matters whether the only good one (who wasn’t that good) or the cop dies, the sacrificial lamb is the innocence lost by a society on the brink of the abyss. And it puts you, to put it in Italian terms, either on the side of the extinguisher and the cobblestone or on the side of the tear gas and the uniform.

Heir and at the same time precursor of the clashes that periodically set the banlieues ablaze, Mathieu Kassovitz thus signs (films?) the suburbs of Paris (or any other major city) in 1995, a black and white gem where there is no longer victim and perpetrator but only hatred.