Friday, June 27, 2014

Free tonight in Tompkins Square Park: the 'tough beauty' of 'La Haine'



Tonight at 8:30ish … it's another in the Films on the Green series with the 1995 release "La Haine."

Here's Criterion describing the film:

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) — a Jew, an African, and an Arab — give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.

2 comments:

  1. Great movie tonight, the park was packed, a standing room only crowd. It was so quiet you could hear the fireflies buzzing, the quiet only broken by the occasional drunk passing through, and later on from a bunch of street urchins who ran around harassing people. One of these urchins did shadow puppets in front of the projector while the movie was playing which drew some laughs. Le titi parisiene...

    La Haine is well worth catching if it's on Netflix or Amazon. Even though it's almost 20 years old it seems like its present day, with some unexpectedly funny moments, great acting by Vincent Cassel and others, and good dialogue.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I Hate that movie.

    ReplyDelete

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