Mathieu Kassovitz’s pacing and cinematography feel like the most remarkably “realistic” look at an inner-city “ghetto” that I’ve ever seen put to film. Three friends, Vinz, a blond, blue-eyed Jew, Hubert, a tall, muscular African boxer and small-time drug-dealer, and Said, an Algerian, three young men in their early 20s who usually spend their days aimlessly “hanging out,” are still aimlessly “hanging out,” but now they’re also fuming and plotting revenge.

We also learn that, during the riots, a police officer had lost his 357 Magnum revolver. As the opening credits roll, we’re shown footage of “riot porn.” We learn that a young man, Abdel Ichaha, was so severely beaten up by the police that it put him into a coma. Think Co-op City filled entirely with the children of first and second generation immigrants from the third world, people with no chance of ever getting a good job, or assimilating into the mainstream. La Haine is set in one of the notorious immigrant housing projects, or banlieues, that surround Paris. It needs extensive notes providing the right historical context. For many Americans, the film needs more than subtitles. It might also have something to do with how the United States has a “path to citizenship” for even the most discriminated against immigrant groups. Blonde cut off the cop’s ear? But, even though it’s one of the best films of the 1990s, La Haine has never really entered the popular consciousness here in the United States the way the smug, tedious Trainspotting, or the quotable, but ultimately hollow Fight Club have. Oh my God, did anybody see the part where Mr. La Haine is such a well-known film in Mathieu Kassovitz’s native Paris that if I were to write this review in French, it would be a bit like writing a review of Reservoir Dogs in English.

La haine english subtitle