Movie Review: La Haine

I just rented and watched a French movie entitled La Haine. I liked it. It was a look at the lives of three friends, living in the French projects. They could have been three friends living in a low income hotel or complex here in the mid valley.

They were trying to fit into a world they didn't fit into. They had dropped out of school. They did drugs, but they also watched cartoons and quoted silly cartoon sayings. This seemed out of character for young men but not young men raised by a television set. They were not in any way sophisticated savvy street kids and the existence of such, is likely an urban myth to begin with.

They had single parents or no parents depending on who was in jail at the time. They had no jobs and no hope for jobs. They could not seem to speak one sentence without infusing into it a plethora of cuss words. The only way they knew how to connect with women was abrupt with the only purpose they knew, for such interactions---sex.

The police were all over them. Riots had broken out and a gym one of the friends had opened, to learn and teach boxing, with the help of a grant from the police, was burned. In the course of the riots a police gun had gone missing. The most volatile of the three friends finally revealed it was he who had found that gun. After showing it to his friends, he began to carry it.

During a shake down at the projects with police, once again, the gunman pulls the stolen gun on a police officer chasing two of the friends. The boxer friend slugs the policeman so that his gunman friend won't shoot the cop and get into further trouble.

Off the three went, on the run, to "the other side of the tracks". Here, they encounter trouble everywhere they turn. I wanted to feel sorry for them or feel some empathy for them, but they were so awkward and obnoxious everywhere they went, so stupid, I knew there was no hope for them ever in their lives.

It was painful to see these young men try to interact with the middle class in various situations. But their internal bickering, their smoldering violence, an inability to interact outside of brutish cursing and crude childish phrases, and their stupidity, muck things up.

When watching these three young lives on the video, you know there will be no good ending, even if the police did not kill them, because they did not have any skills that would enable long term survival. I empathized with them at some points, but it became harder and harder to do so, as the movie progressed. In the end, I was thinking, they can't make it, they're going to die, get it over with.

The three friends finally make it back to the projects and try to act as if the day before had not happened, that one of them had not pointed a gun at a police officer and the other, Boxer Kid, had not punched the officer.

Gunman decides he doesn't want that cop gun he found, and hands off the gun to boxer man, at the end. Gunman and the youngest of the three friends head to their building. They are intercepted by a cop, who throws gunman against his car and waves an assault gun, in bravado, near his head. The gun accidentally fires, killing the kid.

Boxer kid sees what happened and runs back. He's angry. He has the gun. He pulls it and points it at the cops head just as the cop points a pistol at his head. On the other side of the police car, the youngest of the three clenches his eyes shut, as you hear shots fired.

And that is the end of the movie.

I rate this movie Three Stars out of Five. It is not an entertaining movie. It would be a good movie to show to psychology and sociology classes at schools and to those who dream of solving poverty. La Haine is a movie that made me think. It was also quite painful to watch. Want to be entertained? Pass La Haine by. La Haine is a gritty thoughtfully done reality check.

I came away from this movie thinking. I thought about the seething energy of some youth, born to those born to similar circumstance, that has no outlet or direction or hope, yet the energy cannot be confined or contained. And so, when kids grow up in those situations, that energy is directed into whatever the energy of those that have gone before in that area in those situations was directed into. Usually, it's crime and drugs. And the prisons are then filled.

I can see no way to change this pattern. Well, I can maybe. You either make it so those kids are never born, whose future parents live in such circumstance, or society must take over the role of role model and parenting, providing the direction for the energy. I can only see these two solutions. Maybe there are others?