Even though the footage comes from a mid-90s news report it wouldn’t be out of place in one of last summer’s protests, either in America or at various places across the world. The opening shot is of contemporary news footage of rioters pushing against the police, while Bob Marley’s ominous “ Burning and Looting” plays. La Haine (Hatred), the brilliant 1995 film from director Mathieu Kassovitz, plunges us right into the middle of that still-relevant social tension and soberly investigates how and why it happens.
Unfortunately, all that tres chic glamor sometimes overshadows the seething ethnic and economic tensions that crackle beneath the city of light. As a legendary enclave of artists, Paris rightfully boasts of a proudly sophisticated and cosmopolitan style. But, crucially, all that aesthetic rebellion must be linked with political urgency - a desire to show the unwilling public the lives of those they would otherwise refuse to acknowledge, respect, or understand. You can behold it in all those gloriously bold and vivid brushstrokes of the Romantic painters or from the multicolored gallery of Les Fauves, aka “wild beasts.”Ĭinematically, this subversive panache appears in films by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Pierre Melville. You can read it in the 15th-century murder ballads of Francois Villon or in the tainted love between the “cursed poets” Verlaine and Rimbaud.
Shocking the bourgeoisie with some avant-garde aesthetic is a badge of honor.
There’s a grand tradition in French art of celebrating the poetic outlaw.
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