Issue 191 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published November 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review
La Haine (Hate)
Dir: Mathieu Kassovitz
In its first week of release in France one million mostly young people saw La Haine.
Youth, both black and white, left the housing 'projects' that ring Paris to flock to the capital and watch the work of 25 year old director Mathieu Kassovitz. 'It's about us. It's our film,' they told one reporter.
It is easy to see why. La Haine portrays the lives of three young working class men on a riot torn housing project in the Paris suburbs. Hubert is black, Vinz is Jewish and Said is an Arab. They are good friends. They share the same language, the same culture and the same experiences. The film plots 24 hours of their lives.
Is this credible, you might ask? An Arab, a Jew and an African all friends in France where the racisrn promoted by the fascist National Front is poisoning mainstream politics? It is. In the same month of La Haine's release a riot exploded in the Belleville quarter of Paris. As police arrested a Jewish youth they snarled anti-Semitic insults and anti-Arab remarks at the crowd that gathered. A riot kicked off with police fighting local youth of different ethnic backgrounds, followed by an anti-racist protest with banners proclaiming, 'Arabs, blacks and Jews unite'.
In La Haine Belleville is represented by the fictional Bluebell estate.
What dominates the lives of the three characters is a burning hatred of the system and the police. And the police hate them too. The film opens with the French riot police, the CRS, battling with the population of Bluebell. Teargas is fired and bricks and bottles lobbed back.
The incident that has sparked the anger is a case of racist police brutality. Abdel, a 16 year old, hovers between life and death after being beaten up in the local police station. Abdel's older brothers tour the estate the next day with a shotgun, determined to even up the score. Hubert Vinz and Said also want revenge. Vinz shows his friends a handgun that he hides in his clothes, much to the alarm of Hubert.
Hubert is the 'sussed' one. He is desperate to get out. He has spent the last two years building a basement boxing gym only to have it burnt out during the riot. He is scared of following his older brother into jail. Said tries to mediate between the two. He gets by with drug deals and petty crime.
The film has a restless energy about it. It is shot in black and white to give it a documentary feel. 'This is reality,' is the message Kassovitz is trying to put across. So the first names of the actors and the characters they play are the same.
Hubert, Vinz and Said's outlook on life is formed in sharp opposition to their oppression. The police are pigs, the mayor who tours the estate the day after the riot is a sell out, the upper classes they come across in a Paris art gallery are figures of fun. And the Nazi, one of a gang that attacks them, deserves the good kicking he gets.
Hatred of those who hate them fills the lives of the three friends. But it can only take them so far. What are the routes out of unemployment and poverty? If you shoot a policeman then what have you achieved apart from an individual act of revenge? How do you eliminate the Nazis completely? Some of these questions are tackled. Sometimes the film tips into caricature, which is unfortunate. At points it lags, as though it can't keep up with the characters' pace.
The film has virtually no female characters in it and none with any depth. This is annoying, especially when we encounter people like Hubert's mother--who, if developed, would enrich the film.
None of this, however, should stop anyone going to see La Haine. It is also an engaging and funny film.
The scene where a DJ blasts out over the smouldering estate a mix of a song called 'Fuck the Police' with Edith Piaf's 'No Regrets' brings a smile to your face. By contrast, the scene where Said and Hubert are tortured by the police is authentic and frightening in the casual brutality it evokes.
La Haine is provocatively anti-racist and anti-police. Not a bad thing to be in France in 1995, it seems to me.
Hassan Mahamdallie
Il Postino (The Postman)
Dir: Michael Radford
'The dog would never try a metaphor,' Dr Johnson complained about Jonathan Swift. Il Postino shows that metaphors can change people's lives.
The film is set on a small south Italian island in the early 1950s. It is a time of intense social and political conflict, as the conservative Christian Democrats consolidate what would turn out to be 40 years of rule against the opposition of the largest mass Communist Party in Europe.
Mario (Massimo Troisi) is a shy, rather slow bachelor who lives with his father, a poor fisherman. Mario hates fishing, so his father suggests it's time he found a job. The Communist postmaster hires him to deliver post to a very special visitor. This is another Communist, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret), who has just arrived to spend his exile on the island. (Neruda was, of course, a real person, but the story is largely fictional).
Neruda, Mario quickly realises, is a man who loves and is loved by women. So he gets him to sign a volume of his poems in the hope that this will impress the girls in Naples. But then Mario starts reading the poems. From this a friendship between these two very different people develops. Neruda teaches Mario what a metaphor is, and soon the postman discovers that he too can create images with words.
Then things start getting really serious. The beautiful Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) arrives to work in her aunt's bar, and challenges Mario to a game of table football. He is smitten at once.
With Neruda's help, he begins to woo her with metaphors praising her beauty--and with some verses he quietly pinches from the poet. Beatrice's aunt resists fiercely--Mario's only capital, she says, is the fungus between his toes (which, when you think about it, is quite a good metaphor). She realises how insidious this courtship by words is. But she's fighting a losing battle.
Once he has won Beatrice, and Neruda has left the island, Mario begins to reflect on how his friendship with the poet has changed him. To begin with, his attitude towards poetry was instrumental; it was a means of wooing the woman he loved. But now he realises that his entire vision of the world has changed. 'I thought you had taken all the beauty with you when you left,' he tells Neruda in a final message, 'but, thanks to you, I can now see the beauty all around me.'
Neruda has changed Mario in other ways as well. He's now a Communist himself. The film darkens in its last half hour, as the political conflicts that had previously lain in the background intrude more directly. Some critics have complained about this. The Guardian's Derek Malcolm, for example, writes, 'The final few minutes... destroy quite a lot.' I don't agree. The final part adds a depth and ambiguity to a film that would otherwise have been merely charming, but which, in its present form succeeds, like all good stories, in being both funny and sad.
Though the cast and financing are Italian and French, the director, Michael Radford, is British. He has a mixed record. His debut, Another Time, Another Place, was a powerful study of the catalytic effect outsiders can have on a closed rural environment. But Radford was also responsible for turkeys like White Mischief.
Here his direction is typical of a certain kind of British cinema. Il Postino is visually unadventurous. If the film looks good, it's because the island and cast look good.
But the writing and acting are excellent. In particular, the two leads, Troisi and Noiret, are outstanding. Troisi was fatally ill during the making of the film, and died the day after shooting ended. This adds to the sombre note on which the film ends, as Neruda stands on the shore, looking out to sea and remembering his friend.
Alex Callinicos