making up syllables: la haine (1995)

last year un prophete, a french film about a young man working his way up the prison pecking order to become a certified gangster, picked up the grand prix at cannes. unromanticized italian crime film, gomorrah, won the year before it. obviously the french have a thing for gritty crime dramas. which is maybe why la haine is so good - it's a labor of love. directed by mathieu kassovitz (whose credits include gothika and babylon a.d...what?), la haine follows the lives of three young men in the industrial parisian suburbs (called a banlieue - bonus french lesson) for a single day in the aftermath of a riot. the english title of the film is hate, so needless to say, there's a lot of raw emotions. especially from vinz, played by a young vincent cassel, who just wants to go 1-8-7 on a motherfuckin' cop.

ultimately, it's an examination of france's working class and immigrant cultures as a juxtaposition to the national parisian identity. there's the city of lights with the eiffel tower glowing at it's center while crime, urban decay and unemployment wreck its surroundings.

consider this parable that's repeated several times throughout the course of the movie by hubert (paraphrasing):

a man is falling off a skyscraper. to reassure himself, every few seconds he says, "so far so good... so far so good...so far so good..."

here we have a delusional man refusing to focus on the important aspect of his fall - the landing. and, like the man, the characters in the story are at free fall, reassuring themselves that everything is okay, all the while they hurdling straight for the ground.