Episode 739: La Haine (1995)

all too familiar today. We will be swalling this film as we discussed it, so if you don't anything ruined, please turn off the podcast and come on back after you've seen it. We will still be here. Solu. When was the first time you saw Laan and what did you think?

And my first thought when I watched it for this episode was like, oh my god, do I have a type?

Because this is a lot like Christallief My Car, the first film that I spoke to you Mike about on the projection booth, because they're both these like gorgeous black and white films that like plunge you into masculinist worlds of fatalism and chaos and decay, and I realized that Christaalioff premiered dot com like three years after Latin, so it'd be a really dark but a really interesting exercise to sort of program them together and.

film since then. And one of the things I just watched it yesterday for the first time, probably in twenty some years, And what really astonished me about the film is, but you watch it as so have all the power and impact that it has when you first see it. But also it's a film that could have been made yesterday. It's just so relevant, so intense. Now I'm a big fan of Matya Kassovit's I think he's an amazing actor and director, and this film, I think is just so extraordinary.

There are things about it that bother me. There are criticisms you could raise about it, as many people did when it came out, But I think it's a really amazing, a really amazing film.

is Vinsic Cassal. I think there's something about him just because he's so angry and abusive and so many of the roles that he plays. I'm just like, I don't really want to see this guy do this again. It's like so unusual when I see him in a role where he's not being an asshole, like you know, I think of movies like Irreversible or Black Swan like those

kind of things. But then he's perfectly fine in a movie like Underwater, And of course, you know, I've seen him in a bunch of things where I'm just like, oh, yeah, no, and he's just he's a fucking fantastic actor. And all three of these leads are wonderful, and I love the way that this film is put together. I feel pretty bad that I've avoided it for so long because this

really nineteen ninety five. This would have been my jam probably in ninety five, and this is I know some people have made comparisons between this and things like Boys in the Hood or Menace to Society, and it's like, no, it's so different, And like you said, so many of these problems are still here with us today. I mean, they get interpreted in different ways, like I'm a you know you talked about and again I apologize for my French,

but is it pronounced ben lews? The neighborhoods, the projects basically like I'm a huge fan of ben U thirteen, the science fiction slash Parkore film, which is very similar to Assault on Precinct thirteen meets Escape from New York, and it's like, I really like the idea of exploring these projects, but not as real, I guess because this one, man, oh man, what a what a wake up call this must have been for France or at least I would

hope it would have been a wake up call. But really, when I hear about the riots and the pow and the things that are still there, I guess it didn't really shake them to the cores as much as I wished it had.

you do, and you're damned if you don't. The film is driven by this impending tragedy, with the ticking countdown and this fall from the skyscraper. We know that our characters won't survive. Life is sort of unstructured and it's meaningless. It's this hopeless cycle and it ends badly in the end, right, And the threat of violence is always is always imminent. But I think this really naturalizes the site as this violent, anarchic space, just like biased media Ridge does, fueling fascination

with or fear of its inhabitants. Right, And it's problematic because Kassovitz clearly wants to incite revolt, he wants to set people on fire, but he plays right into the dominant perception of Bandus as powder kegs Right as hot districts, And I think this film ultimately does very little to challenge the perception of life in the Bandu as like

this lethal mixture of drugs and unemployment and brutality. And the difference between Kassovits and the government ministers watching this film as if it's real reporting is that Kassovitz finds these images exciting, whereas the people in power use these same perceptions to kind of justify the institutional violence that Kassovitz is depicting. It's just like the problem with fatalism.

The problem with narratives that depict death and violence as inevitable is that fatalism is really numbing, it's really stultifying, and it makes us feel powerless. I think at best, this film raises consciousness about certain conditions, but without any viable solution. Any vision of change consciousness raising films, They just breed complacency, right these fatalism tells us that these areas are a lost cause. And then I think that it only really serves to excuse the failures of governments

to address exclusion and social deprivation in effective ways. And fatalism can really play into the hands of the far right, like Lahan could easily promote fear mongering about the inevitability of violence, about rash, misogynistic youth over there, right, and the impending crisis if we let them in, right, And so, I don't know. I find it a really frustrating film because it's also very beautiful and very effective in other ways.

other two, and he's a wonderful character. But by the end, because he's a peacemaker, he becomes the one who is folded back into the life of the of the bonlieux and disappointing, you know what, At the same time, I see exactly what you're saying a little. But at the same time, I think there's a very utopian vision in this In this film, despite how it concludes to bite the kind of downward half, I think it's a very utopian vision of the power of friendship in the suburbs.

And the fact that you have this close relationship not just between someone of African descent and someone of probably North African Arab descent, but also a Jewish French person is really that's not something that you see represented all

that all. And I think that they're the fantasy in this film, that the three of them represent the possible coming together of disenfranchised groups, but of course that doesn't succeed at the end, But just the very fact of them coming together and the interactions between them, despite despite the context for them, the interactions between them are really wonderful. There's something really powerful about watching these innections between these

three very very different people. But I do think Ubert is the one who's distinguished by what he wants and what he does, and the fact that he's folded back into the Bodia is is very much part of that downward spiral you know you mentioned, and of course it's mentioned throughout the film. The story that's told at the beginning, this guy falls off a roof and he watches everything's okay, everything's okay, everything's okay, and then he splats on the ground.

I actually don't like that story very much, and maybe that's why, because it's so fatalistic. Because the thing that I think is more interesting, it's not the final destination. It's the process of how you come down. And in that process of falling down, of coming down, you see the interconnections between these people in ways that are really powerful, And as I said, I think it's somewhat utopian.

also reinscribes Hubert within this discourse of violence. And retaliation that he had denounced throughout the entire film, right, And I mean it also makes a racist move of naturalizing blackmail gun violence in a character who had spent the

entire film rejecting it. There's a lot to commend in their friendship, but I think it's also a little bit problematic the way that the film really goes out of its way stylistically to embed us in the white character's imagination and in his fantasies and in his desires and not giving us that interiority, and that it's psychology for the black or the Arab characters. The film sort of follows Vince in his fetishizing of Ubert's body, in his

blackness and his masculinity. For example, in the scene where they enter the boxing gym for the first time, Vince is sort of whispering to SAYID like, look at Ubert, but he's really mad, and the film, the camera really glides toward Ubert in this very fetishizing slow motion, and we see him spotlet under a single light bulb and he's boxing, and the Kioskuro factually, you know, shows his muscles, and I don't know, I wonder about the extent to

which the film still reduces Ubert to his body. Even though he's the most philosophical character, he's always sort of reinscribed within discourses of the body. Evince will always say things like, oh, I'm not like you, mister black Hercules, right, whereas with Vince we get a lot of interiority, we get a lot of psychology. And so the film sort of does, in a way reinscribe the racist trope of like white man equals brain whereas black min equals body.

It's a very ambivalent portrayal. I think of their friendship.

try to establish these connections between Tree. You could say, an African French identity at something in common with Magreb a North African French identity, because they're both products of colonialism and post colonialism. You can't did the same thing about Vince's Jewish identity. But there's a connection, and that's what I think is part of the desire of this film is to establish that connection between Vince and the other two. I wonder how much that had to do

with very controversial reception at this film. Had he was the fact that it's was criticized roundly because he's not a part of that culture. He came to it as very much as an outsider. Now, I think ultimately, you know, the film has to be judged not on who he is, but on what the film is and what the film brings to or understanding of identities in both colonial potolocoust we have to say to French culture, and in that respect, the story of Grvolski is very peculiar. It's a little

bit like the seld Down. Everything's okay, everything's okay, Everything's okay. Everybody else goes out to I'm sorry, I can't say God to take a fit. Everyone goes outside the train car. Listen to me, I sound like a prude. Everyone goes outside to depcate, but Grinvolski is so preoccupied with not putting his body on display that he basically, you know,

he basically misses the train. Evidently, one misunderstanding that many people had about the story about Grovolski and the old man in the in the bathroom is that he understood it to be a story about Jews being sent to concentration camps, to death camps during the during World War Two.

He says very specifically, they were going to Siberia, and so Polish Jews found refuge temporarily in the Soviet Union in Russia, but they were then recruited, forced by Stalin to become part of these work squads in Siberia, and many of them didn't survive. But it was also a chance of survival that was not offered by death camps, and so in that sense, it was like it was a chance for Brinvolski to find the future, to find life instead of freezing in the gold as he did.

He doesn't say, I don't think where they were when the train stopped and they all got off, but you do sort of wonder why didn't Brunowski walk around or find somebody. You can't do this with a film. You can't say, oh, why didn't he do this? And why

didn't he do that? But there is that element of a kind of passive expectation of what is going to happen to him, both in terms of not being willing to get back on the train because he doesn't want to show himself and missing out on the chance to avoid the possibility of liberatia.

story both of those. Vin says, I've heard that joke before but with a rabbi, and I'm like, oh, okay, but it's it is an interesting way to talk us through the you know, to lighten the air with these jokes. But the jokes are so depressing and the stories are so depressing, like the idea of the Grimalsky story that you're talking about, like, yeah, yeah, this is pretty funny. This guy was trying to run follow the train, but he kept dropping his pants and he kept pulling up

his pants, and yeah, he froze to death. It's just this morbid punchline to it and no offense, but it felt the little Parantino asked. The idea of like popping in jokes and then using the jokes and the punchlines is kind of a punch in the face kind of thing to me. It speaks to the really stylized shooting of this film. I mean when Lahn is mostly known to me from looking at clips on Instagram where it's like,

can you believe the shot? These shots are incredible, the whole thing with Cassel in front of the mirror and that it's actually a different person who is pretending to be Cassel, and that we moved through the frame and we end up in Cassell's world where he's re enacting the whole you're talking to me speech from taxi driver. I mean, that's a beautiful shot, but so many of these shots are gorgeous, and you know, you're talking about

like the fetishization of Hubert's body. I mean, so much of this violence, so much of this world is fetishized, and I think that, you know, Casovitz really went out of his way to make the ben Lieuze very beautiful and to just really make those almost otherworldly. You know, you're talking about this utopian vision, and for me, it's like the once they're in the bean Leus, it is gorgeous.

Everything looks really nice, and it's like you don't see the squalor nearly as much as you think that you would. It's not until they get to Paris where things shift. And I know that he specifically went from being stereo in Labanlieu's to mono once he gets outside and gets into Paris, and just makes it a much more grab world than we had in the projects. And it's an

interesting way that he's contradicting those two things. And you were talking about the whole thing of him being this outsider, and I know it was a big deal for him to live with the actors in the projects before they started production and just to try to give himself some credibility because I think he knew he was very much an outsider all of these guys, and there's a behind the scenes clip where he's like, yeah, all of us are pretty bourgeois, but you know, we're trying to get

some street cred here.

with French Arab filmmakers. But it seems like white authored Bandlu films don't tend to represent family backgrounds or living spaces of Arab youth, just like we don't see inside says Home. They don't tend to demonstrate interest in first generation immigrants. They tend to express the anger and alienation of young men regardless of ethnic origins, and tend to

focus on confrontations with police. They tend to sort of point to a shared experience of exclusion that mask the significance of ethnic difference and the difficulties that this difference presents.

And in these ways, the white authored Banlu films tend to sort of reflect French universalism and resistance to multiculturalism, whereas films about the Bandlu made by Arabic or bare filmmakers tend to avoid or diffuse scenes of confrontation with the police and instead be more interested in problems of identification and integration and in addressing changes and values within

Maghrebi communities, including women's places within it. They tend to look at gender roles more extensively, even if they also demonstrate masculinity in crisis, and rather than centering groups of unemployed youth, they tend to center kind of older people who have put any illegal activities behind them, and sort

of look at interpersonal and intergenerational relationships more. Going back to the Grunwalski story, talking about intergenerational relationships, it's interesting that like a Vince is quoted as Jewish, but he doesn't have the same accent as his grandma or his auntie,

and he doesn't seem to make any personal relationship. He doesn't seem to make any personal connection or any understanding of the Grunwalski story, and most people have read that story as sort of like a reminder of the suffering and the exclusion of Jewish people to sort of lend Vince's anger credibility. But Vince himself seems to really distance himself from Jewishness and instead appropriate kind of ghetto swag and black music and sort of he shadow boxes. He

wants to be Ubert. He has the ring from Do the Right Thing, you know, the radio Rahim. It would be easy to read the film as a film about the instability of masculinity and sort of the instability of a gender that is always reflective and is always appropriative and is so unstable, Like it would be interesting to do a feminist oppositional reading of Latin, even though I think the film is not feminist. It really revels in misogyny.

and flash existence. And I find that interesting because I think the film does try to avoid what would be standard stereotypical representations of the sexism associated with Mania culture, and there's been so much attention brought to them through the work of women oh writers and tailmakers, and it's something that bothers me a little in this film, but I don't see any other way that it could have been done. This, to me is something else that's very utopian.

Like it's Starrett, it's just fine for women to live in this imaginary realm and though in the minds of the main characters, but as long as there's no real grounding of women in any kind of substantial way except for typical motherly or grandmotherly rule like getting the vegetables for dinner and picking up the wrong one. I mean, it's just very purposely dissociated from any female fear that

might exist in the Navalio, which I find disappointing. But at the same time, I do think it tries to This film is trying, and this may be a nipa of the film. It's trying to avoid the kind of typical sects of representations of men in Boleo culture. Yeah, I went for more. But there is, however, the one male character who does acquire a certain kind of I hate to use this word demin and present is infinite delf because you know, when it comes time to just

show how tough he is, he can't do it. He can't. He not only can't kill the skinhead. And by the way, you know that is Casaves is playing the role of the of the skinhead. He can't do it, but he also throws up after he can't do it. I mean, this is someone who there's a real gap between these aspirations towards being a tough guy and the reality of what he is and how he lives in the in the world. He may talk a lot about violence, but he can't abide it.

Sayid's mother or with a song machine as well. So they are so trapped in that domestic space that we, yeah, we don't see them, because so much of this movie is them wandering in the streets, the three men wandering the streets, and they run into a lot of people, but they sure don't run into women. They are very much hidden from view.

You could also show that and with Celine Siama's film Girlhood and sort of then have a conversation about the colonial dynamics at play when these directors come in and build their careers on stories of marginalization, but without arguably making any tangible benefits for the people being represented on screen.

It's interesting to think about, like the ways that Latin sort of criticizes Vince's swaggering machismo bullshit because it always fails, right, and it always it creates conflicts with the only people who seem to really care about him. It tears apart his friend group. But it's also the same kind of swaggering muchismo bullshit that the cops are using. And the difference is that when you play the same game as the cops, when you use this kind of toxic masculinity,

you're doomed to fail. You're doomed to be killed. Your friends are doomed to be killed because the state's power is legitimized, right, the power of the police is legitimized. When they do toxic shit, it's legitimate. And so that's like that, I guess that's like a more feminist oppositional

reading of the film. But at the same time, the camera seems to really be really be reveling in Vince's machismo, like the way in the in the taxi driver sequence, the way we don't get critical distance, right, we don't see Vince from a distance, we don't get to critique his sort of like playful performativity of gender. The camera is directly in front of his face, giving his words

like the maximal impact. Right, And when they go to the gallery, they treat women like currency, Like Said is like, yober, like, go talk to those girls for me. Remember when I brought you a taco last week, you know? And Vince is like, no, no, get to get to get one for me, right, and so and then Said goes up and he just like expects the women to like automatically give them their numbers for sex. Like it's just like it's so transactional, You're like, what planet are you from?

Like the one of the women offers a really nice critique. It's like this nice line where she's like, we were fine, we wanted to talk to you, but when you get all aggressive, like how can we respect you? But the boys they don't have any answer for this that. They just get louder and work aggressive, like say it immediately raises his hand in a threatening gesture, and the soundtrack get like throughout the film, the soundtrack really aligns us

with these men's experience. Right, it rises and it gets more aggressive in the gallery sequence as their aggression builds and it cuts off right when they leave. So the film is irrevocably, always, always, always, and often very beautifully on the side of these three boys, right, really implanting us in their brains, especially Vince's.

back to the Tarantino reference. I don't want to dwell on it because people have awful lot, but there's something very performative about a Vincent saying, you know, it's like you talking to me, talking to me, you're talking to me. Kind of changes a little bit each time. I'm not sure it changes radically, but it reminds me very much of that story that drives me crazy. Of goes past one floor, Oh, everything's okay, next floor, everything's okay, and

then splots on the ground. There's this attempt to render that that theme from taxi driver in a meaningful way. But it's nothing but an attempt at changing things that are never going to really change. No matter what differently you say, you talking to me, you're talking to me, you're talking to me, it always ends up in the same in the same place. And that goes back to lou what you said, of course, about the fatalism of

the of the of the film. I don't want to insist though, on the difference in the film that's brought by Vinta's character being Jewish. It could be brought out in more detailed and interesting ways, I suppose, but I think that's something in this film that can't quite so easily be absorbed into Well, I don't know what narrative I'm talking about. Fatalism. Well, yeah, there is a fatalism associated with what it means to be Jewish and poor in contemporary and a post holocust in a post final

solution way in France. But I do think there's this real attempt and that part of the reason why I call the film so utopian and a vision. There's a real attempt to try to trace a Jewish man's path along the line not identical to but along the lines kind of following some of the lines of the two other of the two other characters, and to me that

the real distinction about the film. I'm not saying it's particularly well done necessarily, but it's a fact of difference in the film that I think makes them a little more interesting. Well, I shouldn't say a little more interesting.

I think it's an interesting film or no matter how you look at it, but that particular difference I think really fanned out in the film as being significant in terms of how there's an attempt to kind of I don't want to use the word deconstruct, but redefine what it means to talk about friendships in the Balia too, reassess them in different in different ways. Because I think everyone knows what the basis of oppression is of North African and African men in the suburbs. It's colonialism and

post colonialism. That's not hard to wrap your mind around. I think a lot of people would find it very difficult to see the connections between a post final solution French identity in France and colonialism and those colonialism. They're not the same, and any attempts to try to make them the same or even that similar are going to fail. But there is an attempt to create that connection in

this film and that I find admirable. But even if it doesn't go anywhere, the insistence on Vince's vulnerability in those last scenes with the skinheads, I find that you could say that that's adopting one of the standard ways of looking at Jewish Men, especially in a post Holocaust era, that is as weak and insufficiently manly and et cetera.

And the film doesn't do that much with it, because after all, its and dies, But I still think it's a really interesting attempt that problematizes somewhat the standard view of the ballieu. It's only having to do with Black African and North African Idanady. I think what's.

can combat religious fundamentalism. Unlike the French Government right and other films about the Banlou, they chose not to see the big city at all. They don't make any foray into Paris because they want to cut off the residents from the oppressive kind of spatial logistics of the city and instead focus on bonds within the bun Lu. So these are three different kind of ideas of what a utopian Bandu film could look like, and they're all sort

of interesting productive alternatives to representations like lain. A film can be really utopian when it explores what equity could look like, what revolution and its results could look like, and what a world could look like without spatial and racial divisions. And there are oppositional films out there, There are utopian films out there, but the films that get awards like Lahen will keep showing people in power visions that they recognize.

and the story just really doesn't go anywhere. But it's like this whole bonding of the younger generation with the older generation and just seeing how they are still going to be stuck in this no matter what. It feels like. None of these kids that are hanging out with the

three friends just here or there anywhere. And I do appreciate that the one the kid that's telling that story the way that he just kind of throws himself out of the trio when he thinks that there's going to be trouble and he's just like, oh, this doesn't look good. I'm out of here, and just beats himself out. But yeah, that whole idea of like this is so cyclical and we'll just continue to go. And there's only one good

cop in the whole film that we see, who well barely. Yeah, And I know there was a real concern from Kasovits as far as I want to show that there's at least one decent cop so I can't be basically accused of saying all cops are bad, And same thing with when it comes to like, oh, well, I made sure that there was a good black character as well as a drug dealing black character, because I don't want there to be accusations that all black people are drug dealers.

So I'm like, all right, I understand where you're coming from. But it's just it feels a little semi instancere as far as I have to do this so that I can't be accused of something else, it's like, stand by your guns and just have these characters be these characters.

someplace else to you bear. Okay, that's sweet, but those are band aid they're not there's nothing deep about them at all.

This is the whole idea of like burning down your own neighborhood. I mean, for me, it's just like, yeah, go to Paris and start burning down those buildings, why don't you?

his own name. No one's ever really sure like which far or Mohammed people are talking about because there are like different ones in the cite, and our identity is also really unstable, like as viewers were sort of placed in mirrors or were figured as art exhibits. And there's this like uneasy reflective aspect of the film where it's sort of like structured like a mirror. It's split halfway through between the Sita and Paris, and it begins and

ends with the same story. So there's that reflection. But like logic seems to be breaking down as well, right, like how did a car get into a gym? Why is there a cow in the cite?

hens almost touching from this is teen Chapel. It's like blown up against the wall and it's right right when Vince is like, oh, like, go off without me. I don't need you guys. Anyway, he's sort of he's standing in front of a sculpture of two hens that look like they're about to cut him. So it's I can't tell if that's threatening or tender, but yeah, there's it's a real it's a world in disarray.

the guy who's falling. You know, so good, so far that kind of thing, and then you see the Earth and you're just like, oh, he's it's almost as if he's falling towards the surface of our planet. And then instead what we see coming in At first it looks like it's some sort of a meteor or something that's going to crash into the planet, but then you realize it's a Molotov cocktail and it lights the entire screen on fire, and that's when we learned that the Earth

was a reflection inside of the water. Gorgeous, gorgeous shot. But I love what you're saying as far as the reflective nature of things. Right there in the first major shot of the film, we have that reflective.

just tells me I'm about to die. I wanted to get back to the point that you made earlier, Mike, about the way that the film is divided into like pause of It's apparently wanted to shoot one episode in color, the other in black and white, one in thirty five millimeters, one in sixteen, but instead we just have the site

by day and Paris by night. The CTE. In these long traveling shots which require an establishment in space, right, you need to lay down tracks, whereas the center the city Paris is shot on foot with a handheld camera. And then like you said, Mike, we have this mix between stereo and mono, and in the CTE we have like short focal distance, so the characters are really integrated into their wide surroundings in their long takes, whereas in Paris it's long focal distance to detach the figures from

their backgrounds. The whole environment changes, and it really to me, it really naturalizes problematically this division between Paris and between the Banlieux, and it sort of really entrenches this division that I think is harmful because if we assume that this division is natural, if we make films in which this division is so palpable, then it makes it easier for people living in Paris to ignore the other side and to assume that it really is a foreign country

and it really is not their problem. I think making films in which the division is so stark it rubs me the wrong way. It seems dangerous.

And even the art gallery to me looks so much like a joke in a in a Godell film. There's nothing about that Paris that is recognizable. I don't think is recognizable unless it's in the most abstract sense of you now, oh, it's the filmic representation of Paris.

some ways, it makes it a strange entity. And frankly, I find Paris more threatening to them, the three of them, than the than the Volieu is because it's so unfamiliar and so it's freatening, it's very unsafe.

to even find his place. That's such an ordeal that they had to go through.

between Kassovitz's Skinhead and Vince. And they're also really mirrored when they're both coughing and vomiting at the end of that sequence. They're doing it in the same way on like opposite sides of the screen, but at the same height.

But Asterix is sort of also an interesting, an interesting parallel of Vince, Like Strix is also doing this kind of goofy posturing of non white masculinity with his nunchucks, right, and he's reckless and he's out of control, and he's like a heightened version of the qualities that are driving Vince apart from his friends. But unlike Vince, Asterix is

totally in charge. He's at ease with his surroundings, with his body, with his gun, and Vince is chastised and infantilized for touching Astrix's gun, and Astix then immediately like grabs Vince's gun and reveals complete mastery over it. Right, he fools Vince into thinking that he's so tough he can play Russian roulette, and it completely invalidates any power that Vince felt. And Vince is like trying to practice tough guy de Niro masculinity. But Asterix gets to his

lines first. He's like, are you aiming at me? Are you aiming at me? And so, yeah, I think it totally. It just serves to totally undermine Vince's like already tenuous grasp on masculinity and also to exacerbate the tensions between the male friends.

rest of the movie pretty much. It's just like, this could be a tender scene, and it is kind of tender, but at the same time, he screws it up. He doesn't know how to use those clippers whatsoever and can't fix it, and I wouldn't trust him to fix it either.

I think so, yeah, he's definitely in. I think his most famous role for most Americans would be the role that he plays as one of the fighters that is alongside Wonder Woman in the Wonder Woman film, the first one.

can't understand. But it keeps getting because it's so prevalent in rap like, it keeps getting absorbed by mainstream French culture and so it has to keep rapidly evolving in response.

different expressions that were really important. But maybe I'm missing out on more misogyny, like I can I can live with that, but I do wish that I understood the language better because it's so sad to see they're saying like, oh, those pigs, and I'm like, no one talks like that anymore, Like it just makes it cute instead of relevant. I don't know.

And there's some interesting plays with what's literal and what's what's figured, as in the film lou I supposedly speak fulent French, I am lost, and much of the dialogue in this film like you.

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surprised at how relevant it seemed to students. But when I first decided to write about it, which was, you know, a few years after the film had come out, I first wrote an article in a collection in two thousand and then I turned it into then expanded it into a book which came out in two thousand and five. And the other, the other you know, the interest of film and the fact that it never ceased to interest what myself but also the students. I thought, there's something

interesting in this film. The other reason was more to biographical is because I was myself brought up in the suburbs of Paris, and I was seeing this new phenomenon of what people call the film the Bonnieu, that Bonneu being the suburbs of Paris, and I thought, well, you know, I know about the Bonnieux myself, because that's where I come from. And I was interested to confront my own knowledge with the representation in the film, if you like.

And then when I wrote the book, as you may know, if you there's an annex where I talk about visiting the place where it was shot, which was a bit traumatic. And I realized then that the kind of suburbs that I had known was very different from you know, because when I was a child, it was earlier, and the sociological makeup of the Parisian suburbs was different. So, and I have more recently I've written as about other films

are set in the suburbs of Paris. So as I said, it's both, I suppose it's both a scholarly interest because of the films and especially Latin that's a particularly interesting film, and also in my own history, you know, with a way of kind of looking at it with that perspective.

The thirty glorious years were you know, between basically the end of the war and the early nineteen seventies, and with General Dogaul and the fact that they needed to house all these these new population, so and my parents were sort of typical of an earlier immigration, if you like, which was they came from the country, and so there was what was called rural exodus after the war, where a lot of people left farming, which was the case of my father my father and moved to Paris so

to and usually at beginning to the suburbs of Paris. So that's when they expanded it. And in the nineteen sixties and seventies, this kind of more brutalist architecture we associate with the suburbs of Paris now with sort of impoverished population living in the kind of places we see in Latin has become a sort of synonymous with the suburbs of Paris, with the Bolieu. But in the early earlier times it was it was, it was kind of

very different. So so yeah, so when we see the in Latin, which was made in nineteen ninety five, there is this trio of young men as and white Jewish, North African BIRR and black and it corresponds partly to some extent. Although the film is very is tragic. Of course, there's a tragic ending and it depicts very difficult social background.

It's also there's a kind of utopian aspect to it, in the sense that even though those three young men are from different ethnic backgrounds, it's not a film about racism. It isn't a film about them having difficulty with each other because they are Black, White, Jewish and North African.

So and that is I think a French specificity, let's say, compared to American films that deal with you know, the projects, as you say, in American cinema, that tend to emphasize more racial conflict, the French films tend not to so with Latin, these three young men are more like a unified group fighting against the police, fighting against the adults, fighting against women. But they unify, they're not fighting against each other in not in terms of their racial and

ethnic makeup. So and that is that's a very important aspect of the film, but one that is I think, very very specifically French.

about academics and people writing about those films. Nevertheless, they were not particularly popular with audiences, and so after that, with Latin, you begin to have more of a more popular filmmaking. But what is interesting is that I think Latin created a sub genre in which it is almost unique, because although there have been others that followed Liane, actually none of them has ever equalled its level of the

combination of kind of sociological interest and popular success. And until possibly in twenty nineteen, there's a film called Limiserable by director called Largely, which is often seen as a kind of a new Lain, which, in extent, to some extent it is. But I think interestingly, Laine continues, sorry let me start it, Lane continues to be celebrated, and as you know, this year is the thirtieth anniversary of its making since it came out in May nineteen ninety five.

In May of this year it will be the thirtieth anniversary, and the celebration has already begun, including there was a stage musical that Mattyo Kasovitch put together and which I saw in Paris at the end of twenty twenty four. So that film has been endlessly worshiped and celebrated and imitated, but somehow never quite equaled. So you have derivations if you like. There are comedies mostly and things like that, but not somehow, I think it really remains unique.

And sung. So people are singing and dancing. The dancing is more as you can imagine, more like break dance, and the music, you know, it's along the lines of rap and hip hop music. It was actually rather interesting. Some of the scenes were really very much like lifted out of the film and very very similar. One difference, I think one thing they've tried to address is the recurrent criticism that Latin is again is very much a male orientation. So we have these three male heroes and

then the women very marginal to the story. In that sense, it's quite similar to the Jean Pierre Melville film, and so there is for example, there was a very attractive scene with a female singer, which definitely was not in the film, so so, but again it remained marginal. It's quite so. The visuals is it's in the visual spectacle a vocla and through the decor. And then there were scenes with people acting out scenes from the film, you know, with three young men from you know, as you have

them in the film. I think it was quite successful. It doesn't really add much to the film, but if you're interested in the film, it's it's worth seeing. I know that he was intending to take it to. It has a rather limited run in Paris, and it was intending to take it to provincial cities. I think it

did quite well. I don't know if it's yeah, I had gone elsewhere, but it's it's certainly, you know, I think yet another manifestation to me of the fact that the film itself has become like a myth as well. It's sort of it's no longer just a film. And when it first came out in nineteen ninety five, it was called a phenomendo associatives social phenomenon because it went beyond being just a film.

loved it. And one of the questions I always asked them is why is this film relevant to you? You know, what do you see in it? Because it's an old film. For them, it was like a very old film, black and white with no stars. Well, of course one of them, Van sant Castell, became a star thanks to it, and they all thought it was it spoke to them that

it was still relevant to them. And these were people from you know, rather privileged schools in London in the UK, not at all from the same background as in the film, and yet they saw it as talking to them, these young people, their anxieties and the fact that the film is very thrilling, it creates this kind of urgency in a number of ways. They also thought that, of course the black and white images made it more timeless, which is true. So with my students we did experiments of

looking on the DVD. You can find some scenes in color as it was originally shot. And when you say it in color, all the students said, oh, my god, it looks so dated, and partly because they thought, oh that the track suits look completely dated because they escaped me. But they could see that and they said, in black and white it makes it kind of yeah, timeless and so both socially relevant but also timeless. And I think that's one reason why the film is done so well.

musical concert. It's enormous, so what you see is an enormous stage with a lot of people. So what the musical did was more emphasized the ensemble and the sort of crowd scenes and little groups in so in that sense, the actors were not trying to compete with the three actors in Lie because they were not individualized in the same way as they are in the film.

the city antra muros, you know, within the walls. Because the Peri film around the city, it's like the city is still medieval thought, which is separated from what's outside.

And there's a real division culturally and especially between the center and the suburb, and recurrently, politicians since the nineteen sixties are saying, we're going to solve the problem of the volume, and then occasionally a film like that comes out which they use as an excuse in a way to say, oh my god, now we know what the problem is and we're going to solve it, and of course they don't. And when I was very both amused and depressed to see that when Lemishrab came out in

twenty nineteen, exactly the same thing happened. So in nineteen ninety five was Jacques Chiracus president, and you know, he made his ministers watch the film, saying, you know, look at this, you're going to know what to do. And then in twenty nineteen when Le miss Arabs came out, Emandel Macran did the same. At the same time as he didn't do anything to solve it. And so there is a kind of recurrent failure if you like toss. Of course, the problems are addressed, but they are enormous.

I mean, you also have to remember that the population of inner Paris is actually quite small compared to the massive population outside. Things are trying, the politicians are trying to change things, and in particular, there's a project now running for a few years and was actually boosted by the Olympics, which is called the Grand Paris, and the Grand Paris is trying to break down that division between inner Paris and the suburbs, but it's very difficult to do.

So they're created a lot of new metro lines and of connections that are trying to to break that that fortification, if you like. Although the fortification around barriers technically have gone for you know, they've been gone for a long time, for a century, they still exist in a way culturally speaking. And what's quite interesting is when you watch films set in the bolieu which are not like La and We like more middle class volume people always characters always justifying

why they are in the value. It's like, why would you not be in Paris, because that's obviously where everybody wants to be, And so it is a massive social and economic problem. And at the same time as a film like la And has become it's become a sort of shorthand to say this is the volue, but you also have to remember that it represents only part of it. It represents the more dysfunctional parts of it, which now tends to be have a higher immigrant population, poorer population,

less good habitat and so on. And of course there are a lot of other suburbs that are not like that, or even within the same place, as I know, because some of my family still lives the suburbs of Paris. You might have some very nice areas with small houses and leafy areas, and then there will be a project, as in Latin, in another place in the same city.

And so French politicians, especially if they work in the suburbs, they're often very fed up with the representation of the suburbs always violent as in Latin if you like, where there's going to be clashes with the police and violence and riots. So it's it's part is the reality of some of it, but it's not the entire reality, of course, But it's the power of that film to have become the sort of you know, when you talk about the Bonnieux, people think, oh Latin, yes.

I came he made it. One of the films he made was called in the fifties, it's called The Bon Dieu san Confession, which is difficult that doesn't have an English title, but it takes place during the war, and it represents a Jewish character in a fairly racist way. And I discovered include to left massive archive at the Swiss Cinematic in Lauwsanne, where I did research for it, and I found a telegram from chan Pierre Melville which said, I admire your work, but I'm really disgusted by the

way you represented that Jewish character in this film. And I mean his right, he was right, and I mean Jopiamdy was Jewish himself, and so but it was quite a nice bringing of the two together. But anyway, I've almost finished that, and then I'm writing a little book for the British Film Institute on Jolie Goda film called Le Mes prix Contempt, which is a film I like very much, and partly because of Go Down, partly because

of Brigitbado. So I'm kind of be moving into a very different kind of territory.

One of them, which is one of my favorite terms, is called La traversee de Paris and sort of crossing Paris, but sometimes it was called it's nineteen fifty six film, and it was called Pig across Paris because two characters it's like two men in Paris and one of them is Jean Gappa and the other one is Bourville and they transport black market pork the city at night. So it's a very dark comedy. It's very very good, and

that is one of Outla's best films. But so yeah, so he made some great films, but the end of his career is, you know, is not so good. So I still have to talk about every film.

their everyday experience. And at the same time, there are the Ubert is an insider because they say he lives in the building, but Sayid is screamed at for a for grabbing a hot dog and kicked out of the space basically, but that's also a very I'm sorry I keep going back to this word, but it's a very utopian space that has destroyed utopian because it gives them advantage point that they otherwise do not have on what surrounds them, not only in terms of their compatriots in

the CTA, but also in terms of what the police are doing. Gives them a vantage point from which to anticipate what the police are going to going to do next. I found that scene very beautiful and very and very moving. It's the same at the same time.

see the skinheads down below and yell at them. And also during the most famous scene for me is the Nicla police scene where the DJ is playing and the camera sort of its sores above the scene and it's really making the ct beautiful from this angle above the rooftops, and it's sort of briefly trying to gesture at there's longing for escape, but it never really fulfills that desire, and it also seems to be throughout the film we hear police helicopters over the city, but Lasovitz puts his

camera on a helicopter and it's like he's trying to outline like a briff free or a perimeter of space, of protected space for this moment. But again, it doesn't last long. Nothing pleasurable, less long.

I'm not out hunting them like Vince is. Kind of again with that posturing, and what does he do. He goes hides out at the movies, you know. I mean, you could probably possibly say, because there is a somebody who is wearing a T shirt that says Elvis shot JFK, you could possibly say he's doing the Lee Harvey Oswald by hanging out at the movie theater while he's running away.

But I think it's more of him just like fueling his his masculinity in this whole idea of like the posturing that we've been talking about, because it feels like he's fueled by movies. It feels like he would love to just pop in and go watch the Paulma's Scarface.

of white men. Specifically because in both the sequences, in the torture sequence and in the cinema sequence, the camera remains so fixed on the eyes of white men, they receive the central framing of full human subjects Vince as he absorbs the film, and in the police station we hover around the face of a white rookie cop who's watching not a screen but the abuse of a bird and a black young man and the camera's fixed to just behind him as the cops demonstrate how to torture

and humiliate Said with sexism and with racism and with real physical contact, And like, why do we never see from the perspective of Said or Ubert? Why is it important for us to remain locked in the rookie's perspective. I mean, we can ask this question and we can try to answer it, but regardless, the film really performs an active exclusion by denying as ubera INSIGHT's perspectives, and it just serves to align us with white men again as always.

the time, that we see that there as well. We see him. I mean that amazing shot when they were just waiting at the train station. It looks like they're waiting to go back to their home base. But we get that massive screen made of little screens and they're all watching that, and that's when they learned that Abdel has died. That's the thing that's hanging over this film

so much. You and you mentioned do the right thing like that for me is the okay, you know, now, shit just got real after his death is kind of the Mookie throws the trash can type of moment. It's like, oh, we now are set on a new path. We have to get this vengeance of some sort. And of course it's empty. They don't do that at all, and if anything, Vince gets shot.

star Jean Gabba. And one of the ways that he argues this is that poetic realist films of the thirties often use chanson rists with these like working class ballads to convey emotion, and Peterson argues that the rap and the soul songs in Latin Like serve the same function to express experiences of like urban working class life and to create a sense of community. But of course Latin also incorporates one of the most famous chanson realists of all time, which is the Edith pf song used in

the film. But that song was apparently once used to signify a lack of regret about the violence of the Algerian War and about the French colonial enterprise generally, and so it's really interesting that in Kassiwitz's film, the generations of French citizens descended from France's former colonies suggest that

they have no regrets about violent street action, right. And I think it kind of points to the irony too of like France as a country that really brides itself on revolution, right, and the riots can be understood as a form of revolution, but of course it's not. It doesn't count. It can't be glorified if it's done by these racialized others in the margins, right. And yeah, it's it was really interesting. I loved this essay, was sid

I just googled it. I think it was on JS store. Yeah, I can send you then.

of his own misogyny. Maybe he just lacks contextualization that would give his films a real political punch.

and there's that excellent scene. Really one of the only moments in the film where the film critiques stereotyped, biased, sensationalized media representation of the Banlu is when these reporters drive by and they look down at the playground and they're asking these boys questions and Ubert is like, we're not TYOHI right, We're not a safari park. And it's the film really critiquing the way that these young men

are presented as savages in mainstream media. And that was such a beautiful moment, and it's one of the only times I think there is real direct critique in the film.

a very different approach. And so she's sort of she and her sister, who's a social worker, sort of like go out into a bandu and they interview young men and they sort of build empathy with them, build the viewers empathy with these men by asking them very gently and without judgment, whether they have the relationships that they want and what's preventing them from having these relationships. And the film ends by showing examples of love and connection

in the Banvu. And so I think it's it would be really important companion to let end because it asked these, it asks men directly, like why can't you communicate with women? Idn't want to show them together?

queer films from East and Southeast Asia. So I'll get to present my program in London in May and it'll travel around the UK and autumn and after that. I'm really excited about doing two writing collaborations, one on Theo Montoya's film on Hill sixty nine and another on Jane Showen Brune's Instant Cult to Hit I saw the TV Glow, both of which I'm so excited about. So that's that's the rest of my year.

really sad. But as you know, the period that I'm I've been focusing on for way too many years in my life is the occupation and Normandy was one of the major outlets for occupation films during the during the war, and it was in the central occupied down of the city on the Chanzel d And so I am talking about how the movie theater that was used as a kind of stage for a number of collaborationist fantasies during the during the war. Everything that happened at the Cinema

normal Dy was covered in collaborationist movie magazines. That's an interesting It was one of the first. Oh no, it wasn't one of the first, but it was one of the big so called atmospheric movie theaters in the city where it was. It was called Thenonde after the famous boat, and it was meant to evoke the feeling of being on a vacation on a courseboat. And the main room, which I cannot believe I never saw because by the time I lived in Paris, which was many, many years ago,

the Cinema Normandy had been divided into individual theaters. Than any film I went to see at the Normandy was when one of those postage samp sized theaters. We had to trod down a whole bunch of stuff. I never saw the main theater, which it would make me very sad, but anyhow so I'm talking about the Citema during the war.