`La Haine' disturbs, shows hate breeds `Hate'

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by Peter Debruge

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This weekend, you'll have the chance to catch Mathieu Kassovitz's ( Café au Lait ) award-winning French film at the Rice Media Center.

Hate is a shocking film, devoid of color, frills and special effects. If you're like me, the last movie you saw in black and white was Schindler's List , and you're still not quite sure why Stephen Spielberg decided to do it that way. If Hate had been filmed in color, it could easily have fallen into the category of whiny teenage movies like Dazed and Confused. Instead, Hate 's high-contrast black and white makes the movie feel as harsh as the lives it shows.

You've probably never met anyone like the characters in Hate. The movie is about three teenage guys who aren't really friends but who hang out together because no one else wants them around. Vinz, a Jew with sharp features and a short temper, is too dumb for his own good. Said is an Arab who plays it cool but can't make decisions for himself. Hubert is an African boxer who dreams of leaving the neighborhood; he's more rational that the others, but just as helpless. The three of them are the kind of guys who could disappear and no one would notice. The closest thing they have to a job is trading dope for cash in discreet handshakes, behavior that seems disturbingly normal for them.

When the movie starts, it feels like a documentary. Angry teenagers loot and protest while the police try to keep everything under control. Early in the movie, we hear that Abdel Ichah, one of Said's friends, was beaten into a coma by police officers. When Vinz finds a gun lost by a police officer during the riots, he vows that he will "whack a pig" if Abdel dies.

For his directing efforts, Mathieu Kassovitz won three César awards, -- Best Director at the Cannes film festival and the Lumières de Paris Awards. Although it's hard to adjust to the movie's gritty style, Kassovitz uses characters that we probably wouldn't sit by on a subway. Yet he make us feel so comfortable with them that we are their friends by the end of the movie. In fact, when the police capture and brutally interrogate Hubert and Said to show a rookie cop how it's done, we actually start hoping that the policemen will be punished.

Hate isn't the type of movie that people will be talking about in the sense of Pulp Fiction . It wasn't meant to be popular, but it should be discussed because it covers an important problem. It shows an unblinking view of what life is like in places where there are more important things to worry about than schoolwork or meetings, a strikingly bold world where profanity and violence are a fact of life. The movie has only one lesson, and it can only be learned the hard way.

"Don't you remember what they told us in school?" asks Hubert, trying to talk Vinz out of using violence to get even with the police. "Hate breeds hate."

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the September 20, 1996 issue.

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