The youth, the characters we follow are prisoners.
The perfomances are quite stunning and while we do have the youth we concentrate on, there are some diverse views on how to act or where to go.
Now the movie does not concentrate on Black Lives Matter (the movement did not exist back then), but focuses on police brutality, a seemlingless inescapable path french youth in certain areas was facing (probably still are facing). Especially with what is going on in America (once again), with the killing of George Floyd. This was released 25 years ago, but still feels relevant. The only difference is basically that France belongs to the First World and Brazil to the Third World the rest is identical. I saw this movie in the 90's and today I have decided to see it again to compare the situations shown in the movie with what is recently happening in Brazil with several riots and it is amazing the similarities: lost youths with neither instruction nor job unprepared and brutal police force low quality of life in the slums or ghettos in the outskirts of the big cities (in Brazil, there are several slums also in the noble areas). The awarded "La Haine" is an impressive French movie that follows along 24 hours, the lives of three idle friends from a poor suburb of Paris that belong to a lost generation. On the end of the long night, tragedy happens. The trio of troublemaker and pothead friends head to the downtown of Paris where they spend the day asking for trouble. Soon Vinz shows the missing gun that he found in the night before and he tells that if Abdel dies, he will revenge his friend killing a police officer. On the next morning, the Arab Said (Saïd Taghmaoui) summons his Jewish friend Vinz (Vincent Cassel) and they meet the black boxer Hubert (Hubert Koundé) in the slum where they live. When the youth Abdel goes to the hospital in coma due to a battering he receives at the police station, there are riots in the outskirts of Paris and one policeman loses his revolver. As such, LA HAINE is watchable but oddly uninvolving. I didn't like the leads even though the experiences they go through are typically intense. I admit that it's a thematically interesting production and it certainly looks and feels distinctive, but I always find that films like this fail to draw me into the lives of the characters in a truly compelling way. The critics love it because it shines a spotlight on the social issues affecting France during the day: petty crime and poverty, racism in the police forces, integration, gang culture.
Otherwise, this is the kind of film that you can take or leave. Certainly he burns up the screen here with his usual intensity and never disappoints. It's an entirely low budget production, shot in black and white, that's chiefly of note for being the film that helped propel Vincent Cassel to stardom. LA HAINE is a well-regarded cinema verite-style French film that follows the misadventures of three youths over the course of a single day as they tangle with rival gangs, vengeful police, and various weird characters out on the streets.