LA HAINE is a well-regarded cinema verite-style French film that follows the misadventures of three youths over the course of a single day as they tangle with rival gangs, vengeful police, and various weird characters out on the streets. It's an entirely low budget production, shot in black and white, that's chiefly of note for being the film that helped propel Vincent Cassel to stardom. Certainly he burns up the screen here with his usual intensity and never disappoints.

Otherwise, this is the kind of film that you can take or leave. The critics love it because it shines a spotlight on the social issues affecting France during the day: petty crime and poverty, racism in the police forces, integration, gang culture. I admit that it's a thematically interesting production and it certainly looks and feels distinctive, but I always find that films like this fail to draw me into the lives of the characters in a truly compelling way. I didn't like the leads even though the experiences they go through are typically intense. As such, LA HAINE is watchable but oddly uninvolving.

Three young friends are hanging out after the immigrant housing projects exploded against the police in a riot the night before. Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is a Jew and sees himself as a gangster. Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is a loud-mouthed Arab. Hubert (Hubert Koundé) is a black boxer. Their friend Abdel was arrested and hospitalized after getting beaten by the police. Vinz has a gun and vows to kill a cop if Abdel dies. Rioters had looted a police station.

This movie tries to take on some compelling modern issues. The problem is that the group of friends is so diverse. Instead of realism, the movie seems to be trying to be PC. The movie is missing the religious aspect of the fighting and basing it solely on social class. On the other hand, it tackles the police issue head on. Vinz really needs to be something other than a Jew. The rest is great.

When the youth Abdel goes to the hospital in coma due to a battering he receives at the police station, there are riots in the outskirts of Paris and one policeman loses his revolver. On the next morning, the Arab Said (Saïd Taghmaoui) summons his Jewish friend Vinz (Vincent Cassel) and they meet the black boxer Hubert (Hubert Koundé) in the slum where they live. Soon Vinz shows the missing gun that he found in the night before and he tells that if Abdel dies, he will revenge his friend killing a police officer. The trio of troublemaker and pothead friends head to the downtown of Paris where they spend the day asking for trouble. On the end of the long night, tragedy happens.

The awarded "La Haine" is an impressive French movie that follows along 24 hours, the lives of three idle friends from a poor suburb of Paris that belong to a lost generation. I saw this movie in the 90's and today I have decided to see it again to compare the situations shown in the movie with what is recently happening in Brazil with several riots and it is amazing the similarities: lost youths with neither instruction nor job; unprepared and brutal police force; low quality of life in the slums or ghettos in the outskirts of the big cities (in Brazil, there are several slums also in the noble areas). The only difference is basically that France belongs to the First World and Brazil to the Third World; the rest is identical. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Ódio" ("The Hate")