'LA HAINE*, A POWERFUL PUNCH IN THE STOMACH', a review by Naouel Abbadi

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So far, everything's fine... We are in the Cité, a HLM in the suburbs of Paris, France. It's just morning, but there's tension in the air already. The youngsters of the hood have spent all night rioting in the streets, burning down buildings and wrecking everything.

Set in 24 hours, La Haine follows three mates as they wander aimlessly through the city. Vinz (Cassel) is a Jewish Travis Bickle, boiling with anger. North African Saïd (Taghmaoui) is a personable loudmouth, keen to get himself laid. Black boxer Hubert (Koundé) is a more thoughtful presence and his frustration, the most deeply buried. During the course of a day and night, they meditate on the death of an Arabic friend at the hands of the police, and stumble across a cop's lost pistol.

Mathieu Kassovitz dissects a crisis situation of racism and social exclusion in modern Paris, with lucidity but also anger and brutality. Released to both controversy and acclaim in 1995, La Haine ranks among the most incendiary European films of the decade. Furious, funny, intelligent and tense, its treatment of racial violence, issues of the French-style system of integration, disenfranchisement and suburban poverty, introduced audiences to aspects of French life rarely seen on film - specifically police brutality and Le Pen's National Front.

In style and intent, the film occupies a position somewhere between Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing.

Atmospherically shot in black and white and infused with the sounds and style of French hip-hop, Kassovitz's direction has the urgent authenticity of documentary footage. He's also an effective stylist and uses Paris as a striking backdrop. With nowhere to go, the boys slope through deserted public spaces - empty streets, vacant trains, a shopping mall at four in the morning - locations that echo their own sense of estrangement. 'The world is yours' runs the slogan on an advertising billboard. Saïd gets his pen out and alters it to the bitterly ironic - or is it desperately hopeful? - 'The world is ours'.

Powerfully but naturally acted, La Haine's great strength is that it's so fully engaged with the world it depicts. Vital and visceral yet sympathetic to its flawed protagonists, it's Kassovitz's own writing from the start of the film that best conveys his characters' rage at their impotence and isolation, and La Haine's own grimly fatalistic tone. "Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper?" asks Hubert. "On his way down past each floor, he kept saying, to reassure himself, 'so far so good... so far so good... so far so good'. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land."

Writer-director Kassovitz's great triumph is the way he allies outright polemic with intensely powerful drama. In fact, so effective is his handling of the issues that the French Cabinet were reported to have watched the film in the hope that it would help their understanding of the country's ethnically diverse young poor.

*The Hate