Masterclass in the cinema of hate

LA HAINE Mathieu Kassovitz (15); Extraordinary and lyrically bruising: the film that had the French out on the streets. By Adam Mars-Jones

We see such a small proportion of French cinematic output in this country that we're not really in a position to judge the whole. It takes the presence of a familiar star to sell us a French film, and then we crack weak jokes about the French law that requires Depardieu to be in every film made domestically. But from the reaction in France to La Haine, it seems that Mathieu Kassovitz's film looked as extraordinary to its home audience as it does to us.

The film starts without gloss, with bare titles and news footage of running battles between the police and youths from housing estates. The young men do a defiant dance in front of police lines; a policeman throws a rock and jumps up and down like a kid when it lands. But though Kassovitz sticks to black-and- white in the body of the film - black-and-white still says verite to us, even though news footage is now invariably in colour - he doesn't restrict the camera's role to passively registering events. Much of the film's bruising lyricism comes from the camera work: as a DJ plays a bizarre mix of anti-police rap and Edith Piaf, the camera lurches drunkenly into the air at rooftop level. When violence breaks out in the street while break dancers are giving a display in a burnt-out building, the camera stays with a dancer, spinning improbably on his head, while everyone else runs to see what's happening.

La Haine covers a period of 24 hours in the aftermath of a riot. The unrest was set off by the police's beating of a 16-year-old boy in custody. The boy is still in a coma. A policeman lost his gun during the rioting, and Vinz (Vincent Cassel) has found it. His plan, if the boy dies, is to use it on a policeman.

It doesn't seem likely, when we see Vinz waking up at the start of the film, that he will occupy much of a place in our hearts. He looks pretty thuggish, his knuckle-duster jewellery is neither tasteful nor reassuring, and besides, he has left a little snail trail of drool on the bedspread. Still, by the time he's doing De Niro's you-looking-at-me? routine from Taxi Driver while he brushes his teeth, we're beginning to soften up. Meanwhile grandma, as the kids bicker, worries that Vinz will miss temple. It's noticeable that in La Haine, race itself isn't an issue. When friends want to resort to insults, they accuse each other of being "phoney Jews" or "phoney Arabs".

Vinz's friends are Said (Said Taghmaoui), who is an Arab, and Hubert (Hubert Kounde), a black boxer whose gym was burnt out in the riots. In this rainbow coalition of the dispossessed, the allegiances and roles keep shifting. Sometimes Said keeps the peace between the other two, at other times it's Hubert who is the voice of reason. He's remarkably calm about the destruction of his property, and when it comes to women (not, admittedly, a major presence in the film), he is the only one who can start a conversation without fronting up with a ludicrous display of aggression.

La Haine makes no bones about being anti-police, but Kassovitz's screenplay leaves plenty of room for nuance. There's a veteran local cop (he's maybe 30) who rescues Said from the consequences of his own aggression, and laments that he can't talk to the kids anymore. Even when Said and Hubert are being "interrogated" in custody, police brutality is not presented as monolithic. True, the policeman in charge takes the opportunity to give a sadistic masterclass: "Do you know this one? The Shanghai Squeeze. It's an oldie." But the lesson is for the benefit of a new recruit, who says nothing. Every now and then he faintly shakes his head, as if to say, I'll never behave like that. At the end of the sequence, Said and Hubert just look at him, unblinking, and he drops his eyes.

The choice of a 24-hour period gives Kassovitz the option of taking a representative slice of these lives, of saying: this is what it's like every day. The more dramatic strand - what difference will a gun make? - allows him to go for a more conventional thriller dynamic. The director juggles these two ways of presenting the material, and still finds space for humour and oddity. There's a scene in the film that will awaken the dormant trauma of anyone who's ever had a terrible haircut from a friend, and a bizarre cameo in monologue from an old man in a public toilet about Stalin's Russia. Only at a couple of moments does Kassovitz let a conventional liberal agenda show through, with a bit of voice-over that's a little earnest, or a moment in a cinema where we see a boy admiringly imitating Vinz's body language, modelling himself on someone on a collision course with the world.

After so much praise it may seem perverse to pick on the subtitles, but there it is. It's true that the young men in the film are steeped in American culture, but none of them has actually been there, and it's silly to translate them as if they were characters in the films they watch ("Don't diss my sis, butthead," forsooth). None of the elements of the film would work in an American setting. An Arab, a Jew and a black man as friends from childhood? All that fuss over a single gun?

The soundtrack is mainly rap music, yes, but it's French rap. Pote doesn't mean "home boy" or "homey" and has a particular political overtone: the campaign against Le Pen used the slogan "Touche pas a mon pote". When Said shouts insults at some skinheads, he's not making jokes about pinhead and skinhead, he specifically refers to Le Pen. The existence of a national political movement in France based on xenophobic hatred is what La Haine is about, and subtitles that tidy away this fact for the benefit of an international audience betray the movie. When you consider that France has fought a real battle against the Americanisation of films, it's ludicrous that the subtitles of La Haine should surrender so abjectly. They do things differently in France. They're different about difference. That's the point.

n On release from tomorrow