De quoi s’agit-il dans ce film?
 

De nous montrer une journée - i.e. 24 heures qui sont chronométrées avec l’effet d’une bombe à retardement et sont vécues par trois jeunes de la banlieue parisienne, Vinz, Saïd, et Hubert, qui ont conservé leur vrai prénom, ce qui ajoute à l’authenticité des personnages qu’ils incarnent.

Pourquoi j’ai choisi ce film, dont le sujet est la violence et le racisme de la police? Pour plusieurs raisons.

• d’abord, parce que Kassovitz nous présente un aspect troublant de la société française d’aujourd’hui, à savoir l’aliénation de la première génération d’immigrés, celle des Beurs, i.e. des Arabes, représentée par Saïd, des Noirs africains, représentée par Hubert, et des Juifs, représentée par Vinz, lequel pourrait être un Juif Séphardique, dont les parents ont fui le nazisme ou peut-être, comme tant d’autres, ont dû quitter l’Algérie après son indépendance.

• ensuite, pour vous montrer quelque chose de tout à fait différent des films français qui plaisent au public américain, i.e, les comédies légères, telles que La Cage aux Folles ou Romuald et Juliette; ou encore les films à suspense de Chabrol, comme La Cérémonie, ou bien les thrillers de Luc Besson, telle que La Femme Nikita, tout en vous rappelant que ce film, en noir et blanc, n’est pas un documentaire, mais bien du cinéma. Et là, la façon de procéder de Kassovitz ne manque pas d’originalité. Ainsi s’explique la présence incongrue - et irréelle, bien sûr sauf pour nous spectateurs - de la vache qui, dans la seule imagination de Vinz, se balade dans une rue de la cité. 

• pour vous aider, si besoin était, à mieux comprendre les deux sens du mot banlieue en français, un mot qui se traduit non seulement par “affluent suburbs”mais, dans les grandes villes et leur couronne, telles que Paris ou Lyon, est surtout “a dumping ground for the working poor” i.e.un dépotoir pour la classe ouvrière pauvre et démunie. 

• pour vous donner également une image moins “romantique” de Paris, “la ville de l’amour,” image représentée dans ce film par les lumières de la Tour Eiffel, que Saïd essaie en vain d’éteindre d’une chiquenaude, comme le faisait le malin Hypo dans de film d’Eric Rochant, “Un monde sans pitié”, trucs qui ne marchent qu’au cinéma, reconnaît Vinz;

• pour vous montrer, comme si vous ne le saviez pas, qu’une grande partie de ce que j’appellerais l’ameublement culturel de la France d’aujourd’hui est importée des Etats-Unis: que ce soit la veste du policier le plus brutal, que nous voyons au début et en fin de film, avec son blason de Notre DameUniversity,que ce soit l’imitation de Vinz devant son miroir, empruntée au film “Taxi Driver”, ou encore, à propos de son malencontreux coup de tondeuse sur la tempe de Saïd, son bluff en lui proposant une vraie coupe de tueur, comme à New York;

• pour vous donner enfin un exemple du verlan, c’est-à-dire du back-slang utilisé par les jeunes de ces ghettos ? et du défi à traduire ce langage sous forme de sous-titres, ou plutôt à en trouver des équivalents, ce qui donne en fait souvent l’impression que leur vulgarité dépasse celle de l’original.

Vous noterez que les femmes sont peu présentes dans ce film, de même que dans celui de Karim Dridi, “Bye Bye”. Les personnages féminins qui comptent vraiment, ce sont les mères, sans doute parce que ces femmes d’un certain âge connaissent la vie et sont sans illusions quant à l’avenir de leurs enfants. Ainsi, la femme à qui est donnée le plus de visibilité et de dignité dans “La Haine” est la mère d’Hubert. 

Vous noterez enfin, et ce sera ma dernière remarque, que l’épisode le plus original du film est celle avec le vieux Juif dans les WC ? épisode qui commence par quelque chose comme ... (‘Pardon my French!), “Ça fait du bien de chier!” Lui peut parler d’expérience des ravages du racisme et de la haine sociale. La présence de ces trois jeunes, l’un Juif, l’autre Arabe, et le troisième Africain, dans cette banlieue-ghetto parisienne est la conséquence de disruptions historiques, qui ont pour cause, d’une manière ou de l’autre, l’exode juif dû aux pogroms russes ou au nazisme de Hitler ou encore la politique coloniale de la France, qui s’est débarrassée de ses colonies en Afrique noire en 1960, et qui a finalement accordé l’indépendance à l’Algérie en 1962, après une guerre à laquelle, comme je vous l’ai dit ailleurs, j’ai moi-même participé sans honneur. La langue française s’est même enrichie d’un horrible mot pour décrire les violences racistes exercées par les Français contre les Nord-Africains à cette triste époque, les ratonnades, i.e. leur destruction systématique comme si c’étaient des rats. 

A vous et à moi, donc, de trouver le meilleur format, quand vous aurez vu ce film, qui nous permette d’échanger commentaires et réactions. Je crois que c’est un film qui s’inscrit parfaitement dans le contexte de ce cours et dont, je suis sûr, vous vous souviendrez. 

Premier ajout: Extrait du New York Times: “A Raw French Film Survives Translation” (By Alan Riding, Paris)

The title of Mathieu Kassovitz’s second film, “Hate” should have served as a warning. Many French moviegoers were nonetheless shocked by its raw portrayal of the violence and frustration gripping the immigrant-packed suburbs of major French cities. They were taken aback to discover a multiracial underclass, seething with anger, that spoke a slang that most French could barely understand. It was a France that many had not seen ? or heard ? before.

The movie, for which, Mr. Kassovitz won the best-director award at the 1995 film festival, focuses on three young men of distinct family backgrounds: Jewish, Arab and African. All were born in France of immigrant parents, all are fluent in French slang, and all are deeply resentful of a French society that does not accept them. When they recover a revolver during a race riot in which a friend is mortally wounded by the police, they at last have a way of getting revenge.

In France, were the movie has been seen by nearly two million people since it was released last May, “Hate” marked a significant break with this country’s entrenched tradition of making psychological, romantic, humorous, or historical films.

The film, which was shown last fall at the New York Film Festival has been compared to recent movies by Spike Lee and others dealing with the guns and drugs that rule many American inner cities. And some critics have singled out its distinctive hard-hedged language. Caryn James, writing about the film in the New York Times (October 12, 1995), noted that the characters use “up-to-the-minute slang that might confuse even fluent French speakers and that defies smooth translation.”

It was that language, so integral to the nature of the film that presented a singular problem when it came time to create English subtitles.Before “Hate” could be presented to English-speaking audiences, its producers needed to figure out how to provide subtitles that did not lose the bitter flavor of the French street slang. The basic issue was this: Should the language be translated literally, or should it be interpreted in a way that made it more immediately comprehensible to American moviegoers?

Two Paris-based writers were recruited to do the job: Alexander Whitelaw, a former movie producer who has written the English subtitles for some 600 French movies over the last 20 years, and Stephen O’Shea, a film critic for Variety who has worked frequently with Mr. Kassovitz had only one request. His first movie, “Métisse,” which was released as “Café au Lait” in the United States, was subtitled with words taken straight from the language spoken in American inner cities. This time, he said, he did not want ghetto slang to be used, because h felt that it has alienated audiences.

Both translators agreed with this approach. When “Hate” was shown in French suburbs, audiences often included young people from nearby housing projects who were delighted to hear their own language on the screen. “But in the Unite States, it’s difficult to think of inner-city kids going to see a foreign film with subtitles,” said Mr. Whitelaw, who is an American. “Old people also have trouble.”

Mr. O’Shea, who is Canadian but has lived in New York, added: “We therefore decided to do it in a sort of street, hip-hop lingua franca that anyone can understand. The problem is that you lose a lot.”

One challenge was posed by “verlan,” or back-slang, which is widely used in poor French neighborhoods and in the movie. By inverting the syllables of a word, for example, “flics” (cops) become “ keufs,” “femmes” (women) become “meufs,” “mec” (guy) becomes “keum,” “Juif” (Jew) becomes “jeuf” and “noir” (black) becomes “renoi.”

Mr. Whitelaw and Mr. O’Shea concluded that they could not hope to be understood if they borrowed or invented American back-slang. So. simplicity was preferred: “keufs” (cops) became “pigs,” “meufs” (women) were usually “babes” and keums (guys) were “homeys.”

The enormous influence of American popular culture on French youths created another problem: a time lag between French and American cultures. For example, in a scene in which the three friends try to hot-wire a card only to discover that none of them can drive a stick shift, there is a mention of the

“MacGyver” television series that was initially broadcast on the United Sates in the late 80’s.

“It is very popular with unemployed French kids, who watch it in the afternoons,” Mr. O’Shea said. “but it would be very unhip to mention ‘MacGyver’ in the United States. So we just said ‘television.’ When one character mention les Schtroumphs, the French name for the Smurfs, the subtitles say “Donald Duck.” And Snoopy is used to replace the Gallic cartoon hero Astérix.

Short of removing all fire from the street language of “Hate,” however, the subtitles cannot avoid tapping the most familiar English expletives. One four-letter word, for example, is used 83 times in some 1,500 subtitles, Mr. Whitelaw noted., and other appear regularly. “But that’s how they speak,” he added.

For Mr. Shea, the key test with American audiences will be if the titles pass unnoticed. “They’re not meant to draw attention to themselves,” he said. So far, they have been given mixed reviews. On British critic, writing in The Independent, complained that they were too American. But when the movie was shown at Cannes last year subtitled for English-speaking members of the audience, quite a few French people said they were glad to have the subtitles ? to help them understand the French slang.

© New York Times

Deuxième ajout: eFilmCritic (Australie)

http://efilmcritic.com/hbs.cgi?movie=4370

It's not often a film truly crosses the boundary between entertainment and art, but everything about this film is so right, it comes across as poetry. The American name sucks, but apart from this 'La Haine' is perfect in every other way.

Paris is often portrayed as a sexy, sophisticated, haute-culture paradise where the average mans chief worry is running out of Gitanes. Yet this film exposes its underbelly, the grim reality for the thousands of immigrants and unemployed who live in Paris suburbs and projects. Charting the lives of three youths during the Parisian riots, it asks tough questions about racism, inequality and police brutality.

The acting is superlative. Each of the three main actors seems to live their part. There is a real feeling of witnessing what is going on in their lives - the boredom, the anger, as well as the hopes and aspirations of any adolescent.

Yet the main prize must go to Kassovitz. He directs, scripts, edits and acts in this film, and performs each job admirably. The direction is vivid, dynamic and beautiful, and the script captures the feeling of much of the youth in France at the time. But don't just take my word for it - when this film opened in France it caused real life riots.

The mood is devoid of the romanticism of many films about life on the wrong side of the tracks, and the black and white cinematography suits it down to the ground. This is a bleak and disturbing film, with a sense of doom and inevitability seeping into every frame. Yet it is also visually exciting, and packs a mean punch. Just thinking about the ending sends shivers down my spine.

I know that everyone who joins up with HBS bangs on about one film which they think is an 'undiscovered' classic, but I really can't recommend this highly enough. Everyone I know who has seen this loves it, and many say it has had a profound effect on them. As long as racial and social inequalities continue, this film will continue to be relevant.

Yes, it's in Black & White, and I know it's in French, but that doesn't detract from its power in any way. You owe it to yourself to track this one down, it is one of the best films I've ever seen.

Troisième ajout: la critique d’Edward Guthmann

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=//chronicle/archive/1996/04/05/DD13140.DTL

City of Light Shows It Has a Dark Side

In Paris, the most idealized city in the world, African and Middle Eastern immigrants are marginalized, stuck into housing projects and harassed by cops. One night, the pot boils over as dozens riot to protest an epidemic of police brutality.

So begins ``Hate'' (La Haine), a terrific jolt of a film [...] that looks at urban unrest across the Atlantic with alarming images of disaffected youth. Forget the perfumed notions of the City of Light and its tree-shaded boulevards -- ``Hate'' mocks those postcard ideals, scraping them with sharp, angry claws.

IN-YOUR-FACE SHRIEK

Written and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, the 28-year-old French film maker whose interracial comedy “Café au Lait” played here in 1994, “Hate” is an in-your- face shriek against racism, apathy and police autocracy.

Shot in black and white and told in a 24-hour period, “Hate” follows a trio of disaffected homeboys -- Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) -- the day after theirbuddy Abdel has been hospitalized because of a police beating. 

Vinz, a Jew, is a walking time bomb who dreams of “smoking” a cop and likes to look in his mirror and pretend he's Travis Bickle, the wannabe assassin from “Taxi Driver” (“You talkin' to me?”). Saïd is an Arab who plays tagalong, and Hubert is an African boxer who tries, mostly in vain, to temper Vinz's wild outbursts.

The world they inhabit on the fringes of Paris is a bleak minefield of potential tragedy. A billboard depicting Planet Earth says Le Monde est à nous (“the world is ours”), and the irony of that statement is unmistakable.

Deprived of work, respect and a healthy community, the buddies form an alternative family among themselves, bonded by a free-floating rage. In one scene, Said and Hubert get picked up by a cop who stuffs them into an interrogation room, mostly because he wants to demonstrate the art of humiliation and intimidation -- choke holds, racial epithets, sexual slurs -- to his rookie partner.

Earlier, when the homeboys go to visit their injured friend at the hospital, the cops bar them and say, “We're here to protect you.” Right, says Hubert. “But who's going to protect us from you?”

SYMPATHETIC CHORD

Unlike the spate of American “'hood movies” we've seen in the past five years, which romanticize their gangsta protagonists at the same time that they deplore them, “Hate” has a plaintive, sympathetic chord that runs beneath the anger. It cuts deeper and shows us the foolishness of its characters as it mourns their inevitable tragedy.

One night, as the guys sit and look at the Paris cityscape and the Eiffel Tower, which symbolizes all the prosperity, romance and comfort they can never experience, Hubert tells a story he heard from a rabbi, about a man who fell off a skyscraper.

“On the way down,” Hubert says, “he says to himself, ‘So far, so good.’ Like us in the projects: So far, so good. But how will we land?”

“Hate” is Kassovitz's urgent alarm to the French and the world. As long as we avoid facing up to the problems of race, corruption and economic division, he insists, we're bound for tragedy.

“It's not how you fall,” he reminds us in a chilling coda. “It's how you land.”

© San Francisco Chronicle

Quatrièmeajout: la critique de Roger Ebert

http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1996/04/04191.html

Mathieu Kassovitz is a 29-year-old French director who in his first two films has probed the wound of alienation among France's young outsiders. His new film “Hate” tells the story of three young men--an Arab, an African and a Jew--who spend an aimless day in a sterile Paris suburb, as social turmoil swirls around them and they eventually get into a confrontation with the police. If France is the man falling off the building, they are the sidewalk.

In Kassovitz's first film, “Café au Lait” (1994), he told the story of a young woman from the Caribbean who summons her two boyfriends--one African, one Jewish--to announce that she is pregnant. That film, inspired by Spike Lee's “She's Gotta Have It,” was more of a comedy, but with “Hate,” also about characters who are not ethnically French, he has painted a much darker vision.

In America, where for all of our problems, we are long accustomed to being a melting pot, it is hard to realize how monolithic most European nations have been--especially France, where Frenchness is almost a cult, and a political leader like Jean-Marie Le Pen can roll up alarming vote totals with his anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant diatribes. The French neo-Nazi right wing lurks in the shadows of “Hate,” providing it with an unspoken subtext for its French audiences. (Imagine how a moviegoer from Mars would misread a film like “Driving Miss Daisy” if he knew nothing about Southern segregation.)

The three heroes of “Hate” are Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Jewish, working class; Hubert (Hubert Koundé), from Africa, a boxer, more mature than his friends, and Said (Saïd Taghmaoui), from North Africa, more lighthearted than his friends. That they hang out with one another reflects the fact that in France, friendships are as likely to be based on class as race.

These characters inhabit a world where much of the cultural furniture has been imported from America. They use words like “homeboy.” Vinz gives Said a “killer haircut, like in New York.” Vinz does a De Niro imitation (“Who you talkin' to?”). There's break-dancing in the movie. Perhaps they like U.S. culture because it is not French, and they do not feel very French, either.

During the course of less than 24 hours, they move aimlessly through their suburb and take a brief trip to Paris. They have run-ins with the cops, who try to clear them off a rooftop hangout that has become such a youth center, it even has its own hot dog stand. They move on the periphery of riots that have started after the police shooting of an Arab youth. When his younger sister's school is burned down, Vinz's Jewish grandmother warns, “You start out like that, you'll end up not going to temple.”

What underlies everything they do is the inescapable fact that they have nothing to do. They have no jobs, no prospects, no serious hopes of economic independence, no money, few ways to amuse themselves except by hanging out. They are not bad kids, not criminals, not particularly violent (the boxer is the least violent), but they have been singled out by age, ethnicity and appearance as probable troublemakers. Treated that way by the police, they respond--almost whether they want to or not.

As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has grown since his first film. His black-and-white cinematography camera is alert, filling the frame with meaning his characters are not aware of. Many French films place their characters in such picturesque settings--Paris, Nice--that it is easy to see them as more colorful than real. But the concrete suburbs where Kassovitz sets his film (the same sterile settings that were home to Eric Rohmer's cosmically different ``Boyfriends and Girlfriends'' in 1987) give back nothing. These are empty vistas of space--architectural deserts--that flaunt their hostility to the three young men, as if they were designed to provide no cover.

The film's ending is more or less predictable and inevitable, but effective all the same. The film is not about its ending. It is not about the landing, but about the fall. “Hate” is, I suppose, a Generation X film, whatever that means, but more mature and insightful than the American Gen X movies. In America, we cling to the notion that we have choice, and so if our Gen X heroes are alienated from society, it is their choice--it's their “lifestyle.” In France, Kassovitz says, it is society that has made the choice.

© Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

Cinquième ajout: la critique de Peter Debruge.

This French film, presented by Jodie Foster and Egg Pictures, is a stark portrait of life in the housing projects. It follows three young men as they make their way through a regular day in a world of unrest, drugs and violence. Writer/director Mathieu Kassovitz does more with this than roam over already well-explored territory. Filmed in black and white he turns the cultured nation of France into a battle zone that has no more sense of itself than downtown L.A. His protagonists, at first seemingly aimless punks, are disenfranchised kids, unsure of themselves, lying, bragging and praying to God they're not found out. They're surprisingly universal characters in a sadly universal situation.

Watching “Hate” (La Haine) is like hanging out with “the wrong crowd” for a day, spending 24 tense hours with three guys who have a lot more to worry about that you do. Forget Boys N the Hood. Los Angeles is a million miles away from these Paris suburbs, where hate breeds non-stop between the police and the “troubled youths.”

“Hate” is a shocking film, devoid of color, frills, and special effects. If you’re like me, the last movie you saw in black and white was “Schindler’s List”, and you’re still not quite sure why Stephen Spielberg decided to do it that way. If “Hate” had been filmed in color, it could easily have fallen into the category of whiny teenage movies like “Dazed and Confused” and “Reality Bites”. Instead, “Hate”’s high-contrast black and white makes the movie feel as harsh as the lives it shows.

You’ve probably never met anyone like any of the characters in “Hate”. The movie is about three teenage guys who aren’t really friends, but they hang out together because no one else wants them around. Vinz, a Jew with sharp features and a short temper, is too dumb for his own good. Saïd is an Arab who plays it cool but can’t make decisions for himself. Hubert is an African boxer who dreams of leaving the neighborhood; he’s more rational that the others, but just as helpless. The three of them are the kind of guys who could disappear and no one would notice. The closest thing they have to a job is trading dope for cash in discreet handshakes, behavior that seems disturbingly normal for them.

When the movie starts, it feels like a documentary. Angry teenagers loot and protest while the police try to keep everything under control. Early in the movie, we hear that Abdel Ichah, one of Saïd’s friends, was beaten into a coma by police officers. When Vinz finds a gun lost by a police officer during the riots, he vows that he will “whack a pig” if Abdel dies. For his directing efforts, Mathieu Kassovitz won three César awards, and Best Director at Cannes and the Lumières de Paris Awards. Although it’s hard to adjust to the movie’s gritty style, Kassovitz is able to use characters that we wouldn’t sit by on a subway and make us feel so comfortable with them that we are their friends by the end of the movie. In fact, when the police capture and brutally interrogate Hubert and Saïd to show a rookie cop how it’s done, we actually start hoping that the policemen will be punished. 

“Hate” isn’t the type of movie that people will be talking about in the sense of “Pulp Fiction”. It wasn’t meant to be popular, but it should be discussed because it covers an important problem. It will show an unblinking view of what life is like in places where there are more important things to worry about than schoolwork or meetings, a strikingly bold world where profanity and violence are a fact of life. The movie has only one lesson, and it can only be learned the hard way:“Don’t you remember what the told us in school?” asks Hubert, trying to talk Vinz out of using violence to get even with the police. “Hate breeds hate.”

© 1997 Peter Debruge. 

Sixième ajout C: A propos du film de Karim Dridi, “Bye Bye” (1995)

par Edward Guthmann. Chronicle Staff critic

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=//chronicle/archive/1996/08/23/DD24089.DTL

Down and Out in Marseilles

“ Bye Bye” follows Arab youths born in France

In France, where tensions are fierce between native French and a huge influx of Arab immigrants, the port city of Marseilles, across the Mediterranean from North Africa, has the most troubled history of anti-Arab racism. There, Tunisian filmmaker Karim Dridi (``Pigalle'') sets his second feature film, “Bye Bye,” a compelling look at Arabs struggling to raise their French-born children in a country that shuns them. 

Sympathetic but tough-minded, and directed with great assurance

by Dridi, “Bye Bye,” tells the story of two brothers, 25-year-old

Ismael (Sami Bouajila) and 14- year-old Mouloud (Ouassini Embarek), who leave Paris to stay with their uncle and his family in a Marseilles ghetto. 

…/… 

On the surface a plea for racial tolerance, “Bye Bye'' also works

as a family tragedy, a lament for fading cultures and a parable about the price of leaving one's homeland and relocating to a country that stigmatizes and isolates its newcomers. 

Dridi, who also wrote “Bye Bye,” traces those themes through the actions of the two brothers. For conscientious Ismael, still tortured by the memory of his brother's death in a fire, Marseilles holds the promise of a new beginning. But after scoring a job as a dockworker and befriending Jacky (Frederic Andrau), a French co-worker, his dreams splatter against the wall of racism --embodied by Jacky's Arab-hating brother (Philippe Ambrosini). 

For Mouloud, a rap-loving punk with free-floating adolescent angst, Marseilles is just another place to raise hell -- this time free from his father's gaze. Ignoring his older brother's warnings,Mouloud takes up with his drug-running cousin Rhida (Sofiane Mammeri), starts living on the streets and brings chaos to his tradition-bound uncle and aunt. 

Does he want to return to his homeland in Tunisia to be with his mother? Hell, no. France is his place of birth and his home, much as that fact plagues his father. 

Dridi's direction is sharp -- he stages one remarkable scene in a drug dealer's apartment, shot in one long, uninterrupted take ? and he draws strong, passionate performances from his North African cast. `”Bye Bye'' is a strong, craftsmanlike and heart-rending film that serves as a window into a neglected, little-understood culture. 

©1999 San Francisco ChroniclePage D13