La Haine [1995] [Criterion] (BLU)
Mathieu Kassovitz
Amoeba Review
Robbie Ikegami 12/31/2010
“It’s not the fall that kills, but the way you land.”
—Hubert’s philosophical metaphor of falling is emotionally applied to survival in the projects in 1995’s La Haine.
La Haine (translated Hate) prologues with actual news footage of rioting in the suburban projects of Paris. Parked cars are lit aflame and buildings trashed as a female news anchor reports on the riots. After a teen was severely beaten by police while handcuffed in their custody, the projects erupted with a wave of violence and looting. The victim, a minority, was left in critical condition, the reporter notes and suddenly, the TV set shuts off—the audience is in for a radically different telling of the situation. The film then opens on Sa
Synopsis
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
Special Features:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Mathieu Kassovitz, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary by Kassovitz
- Introduction by actor Jodie Foster
- Ten Years of “La haine,” a documentary that brings together cast and crew a decade after the film’s landmark release
- Featurette on the film’s banlieue setting
- Production footage
- Deleted and extended scenes, each with an afterword by Kassovitz
- Gallery of behind-the-scenes photos
- Trailers
- New English subtitle translation
- A new essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and a 2006 appreciation by filmmaker Costa-Gavras
Product Details
- Format: Widescreen
- Language: French
- Subtitles: English
- Aspect Ratio: 1.85.1
- Number of Discs: 1
- Rating: Not Rated
- Label: The Criterion Collection
- Release Date: 05/08/2012
- Run Time: 97 minutes
- Catalogue #: 381
- Region: A