By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 10, 1995

Life in the French projects is as blighted, bigoted and hopeless as it is in Harlem, Sao Paulo or Brixton. That's the fist-swinging message of "Hate" (French title: "La Haine"), a stunning picture by Mathieu Kassovitz that starkly divides the world between French society and its dark-skinned underclass, and between racist cops and oppressed immigrants.

Writer-director Kassovitz, now 28, who has made several, contemporary street-life films (including "Cafe au Lait," which he wrote, directed and starred in), stirred up France with this movie last year. But "Hate," filmed in black-and-white but free of MTV-era stylishness, is more than mere tract.

As the final, explosive scene demonstrates, it's also about breaking free of such environmental influences as poverty and hopelessness, and making one's own moral decisions. And its depictions of a hate-roiled community of Arabs, Africans and other "untouchables" are relieved with moments of humor and humanistic insight. It's thanks to the promotional clout of Jodie Foster, a Francophile and champion of interesting projects, that the movie has made it to these shores.

In an unnamed housing project near Paris, an Arab boy called Abdel has been beaten by cops during a riot. His friend, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), a hotheaded Jewish kid with a monumental authority problem, is furious. When a police gun-involuntarily relinquished during the riots-becomes available to him, Vinz vows to use it on a cop, should Abdel die.

While the hospitalized Abdel (never seen) malingers in the background, Vinz knocks around with his two friends, a sensible Arab kid called Said (Said Taghmaoui) and a noble-spirited West African boxer called Hubert (Hubert Kounde).

Their life, during the 24-hour period this movie is set in, consists of (for them) typical episodes involving hassles with the police, drug deals and passing conversations with immigrant youth on the street or in graffiti-spattered, concrete parks. In this world, the races are many, but the problems-of poverty, drugs and police harassment-are all the same.

They're also strongly influenced by American culture, which adds its pop-imperialistic flavor to the general oppression. Heated battles erupt over what weapon was used in "Lethal Weapon." At one point, Vinz-standing before the mirror-performs a French version of Travis Bickle's "You talkin' to me?" routine from "Taxi Driver." All the while, the short-tempered Vinz carries his snub-nosed .44 inside his pants, waiting for something, or someone, to provoke him. A sense of horrible fate hangs menacingly over the movie. You wait in an uncomfortable limbo for the thing to eventually go off. In this suspense-filled state, you also drink in the richly layered details of an underclass for whom such societal values as common sense, restraint and hope amount to a cosmic joke. Laughter, however, is not their response.

HATE (LA HAINE) (Unrated) - Contains violence and profanity. In French with subtitles.

By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 10, 1995

"Hate," the brilliant, abrasive new film from French writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz, is all muscle and rage. From the opening shot, it punishes us with the intensity of its explosive black-and-white images.

Kassovitz's subject is a riot that takes place in a drug- and crime-ridden housing project in a Paris suburb. The movie, which earned the 28-year-old Kassovitz the best director prize at the 1995 Cannes festival, opens on the morning after the fighting, which left one of the projects' residents, an Arab boy named Abdel, in critical condition after a beating from the police. For most of the day, Abdel's friends-Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Kounde) and Said (Said Taghmaoui)-wander around the neighborhood, assessing the damage from the riot, and waiting for word on whether their buddy will live or die.

If Abdel dies, Vinz pledges, then a cop must die, too. And it's anything but an idle boast. During the scuffles the night before, a policeman lost his gun, and it was Vinz who picked up the .44-caliber Smith & Wesson. With his hardened features and shaved head, Vinz already looks like a ticking time bomb. Now, with the gat in his belt, he is transformed into a merciless and invincible avenger.

From this point on, every encounter hovers at the boiling point. The tension that Kassovitz packs into scenes like the one in which Vinz pulls his gun after he's forbidden to visit Abdel in the hospital is simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. There's a lot of Martin Scorsese's electric expressionism in Kassovitz's style. (At one point, Vinz looks into a mirror and snarls, "You talkin' to me?" In French, of course.) There are traces of Spike Lee's tendency toward nervy social confrontation as well. In France, the population in the projects is more racially and ethnically mixed than in this country, and the filmmaker's trio of protagonists reflects that diversity (Vinz is Jewish, Hubert is black, Said is an Arab). There's a volatile diversity of personalities, too. Hubert, a smooth-muscled boxer with dreams of fighting his way out of the projects, is the voice of reason. He tries to defuse Vinz's hair-trigger anger, but if Abdel dies, no one will stop Vinz-not Hubert, not Said, and certainly not the police.

The police, in fact, are Kassovitz's main target. He characterizes them as the enemy-an occupying army that rules the projects with total disregard for the humanity of the people who live there. The director's sympathy is completely with his protagonists, and he so skillfully conveys their frustration and disillusionment that the atmosphere feels charged, suffocating, desperate.

The only alternative for these lost souls, it seems, is to lash out in violence, if for no other reason than it allows them to vent their fury. In one scene, when the crew passes a billboard that reads "The World Is Yours," Said pulls out a can of spray paint and changes it to "The World Is Ours." In this instance, however, the words-which refer to Howard Hawks's 1932 gangster classic "Scarface"-are a hollow, ironic boast. The world is anything but theirs. They have nothing, and to anyone outside the projects, they are nothing.

Not to Kassovitz, though. His depiction of life in the projects is gritty and sensationalistic, but it's not shallow. He does a terrific job, not just of capturing the aggressive, macho atmosphere of the streets, but of communicating such things as the resilience of the family relationships and the often hilarious chatter between friends.

There is room for poetry in his approach as well. The picture begins and ends with the recounting of an old story about a man who leaps from the top of the Eiffel Tower. On his way down, the story goes, the man keeps telling himself, "So far, so good . . . So far, so good." The obvious point, as Kassovitz notes, is that it's not how you fall, but how you land. But who is falling? In Kassovitz's mind, the answer seems to be France itself, because of its indifference to its poor and disenfranchised.

Hate is not rated but contains scenes of violence, profane language and adult situations.