Someone told me to see La Haine about six years ago. I don’t know why I never got around to it then. Later, in college, I saw some of Kassovitz’s Café au Lait and I remember having some major problems with it. La Haine doesn’t have any major problems, maybe just a significant, minor one, having to do with predictability.

La Haine kept reminding me of Scorsese, but not a film he’d ever made. There’s a Taxi Driver reference that put me in that frame of mind, but the one night pacing of the film reminded me of After Hours. Both films do it well, but have nothing else in common. The acting might be the strongest part of La Haine. I finally understand some of Vincent Cassel’s appeal (he’s really good in this film and I imagine the problem with him in anything else I’ve seen him in is the English). Still, he’s nowhere near as good as Hubert Koundé, who reminds of Sidney Poiter the way Mark Ruffalo reminds of Marlon Brando. The third lead, Saïd Taghmaoui is fine, but he’s the closest thing the film’s got to comic relief (though I kept wondering what I’d seen him in–The Good Thief).

For the majority of the film, Kassovitz doesn’t preach. He has a birds-eye shot moving through the projects that isn’t preachy, he has these lovely unresolved tensions between the three characters–he has a guy seeing a cow–and never gets preachy about it. I don’t even know if the predictability is meant to be preachy, but when you open with a voice over anecdote from one of the characters, there are limits to how much it can matter, how often you can refer to it. The experience of watching the film cannot be summarized into this anecdote… and Kassovitz tries to fit it in and it fails. He went from being gentle to clanking garbage can lids together.

Regardless, it’s an excellent film and it actually has me queuing Café au Lait, which I never thought I’d do….