In April of 1993, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, Makomé M’Bowole, along with two of his friends, was chased down at 4:30 a.m. carrying 120 cartons of Dunhill Cigarettes. His friends were released later in the morning, but M’Bowole was not. Twelve hours after his arrest, inside the 18th Arr. Police Precinct in Paris, he was dead.
Film director Mathieu Kassovitz was 25 years old when Inspector Compain went on trial for the murder of M’Bowole. Kassovitz would have heard the narrative.
The boys had confessed to breaking into a van, but Inspector Pascal Compain suspected that the Dunhill Cigarettes were tied to another burglary. He wanted to press a confession out of M’Bowole, but after holding him all day, there was no evidence that a confession was forthcoming. Compain took his gun out to try and scare M’Bowole. He would maintain that he didn’t know it was loaded. In the same week, another boy was killed by the police while being apprehended for stealing tires. Another was shot while fleeing the police on charges of disturbing the peace.
At Compain’s trial, the facts of the narrative came to light. It was a mistake made by a middling cop, a mistake that resulted from a series of bad judgments: the gun should not have been loaded in the police station; the gun should not have come out; the gun should not have been pointed just above M’Bowole’s left eye. It’s all agreed, even by Compain — but put the facts in order and the trial still lacks explanation.
Two years later, La Haine (“hatred”) was released in France. The movie fades from black to a stark, still image of the world. A Molotov cocktail falls into view and bursts across the frame. It feels almost literal. Kassovitz imagines a kid not so widely unlike M’Bowole and a day that is, at least, emotionally the same. In a volatile banlieue district outside Paris, Kassovitz translates a sense of smallness, a helplessness that seems beaten into the young men who have come from there. At the same time, the cops are not inhuman. It feels as though no one person is as complicated as the circumstance.
Roger Ebert calls La Haine a Gen-X film in his ’96 review, and there’s something to that. Kassovitz was inspired by Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (’89), and his film has an analogous attitude to movies like Mike Leigh’s Meantime (’83) and Larry Clark’s Kids (’95). These are all directors who worked with limited resources to make striking movies about cultures lost inside giant cities. But to call La Haine a Gen-X film feels like an attempt to package it, to make it digestible — and it sounds slightly false after 30 years of relevancy. In a similar way, it feels like a deliberately bad translation to call the banlieue outside Paris “suburbs.”
Kassovitz insisted on his title because he didn’t want there to be any confusion. He didn’t want anyone walking out of his movie and claiming they were blindsided. As he would clarify, it is not a movie about police violence in the suburbs of Paris; it is a movie about hate.
La Haine has refused to go away, and it seems to have haunted Kassovitz a bit. In an interview with BFI in 2020, he was still being asked questions about the choices he made as a 27-year-old director. Kassovitz speaks as insightfully and excitedly about protest filmmaking as he did in ’95, but he seems to have arrived at a wary understanding: 30 years of relevancy says more about the world than it does about his film.
