La Haine

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz this 1995 movie centers around three young men, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and Said (Said Taghmaoui).

The action takes place in a French suburb where the three gentlemen have grown up. We enter the story just as a riot has been playing out and there are police in the streets, burning cars and violence all around. The film is shot in black and white which lends a stylized quality to the action and elevates it to something more generally applicable. But the environment is definitely the suburban sprawl of a major city, the “ghetto” landscape with all its huge towering buildings completely dwarfing the actors. It’s not a friendly landscape to live in and you do get the sense that it’s not really meant for people.

During the riots one of the guy’s friends is shot by the police and one of the police has dropped his gun – uh oh. Oops? Well, Vinz is the one who found the gun and in some misguided attempt to even the score between himself and society at large he decides that if his friend dies he’s going to shoot a cop.

It’s stupid and it’s ridiculous and of course it’s not going to help or work or do the least bit of difference or good.

There’s a beautiful line in there somewhere where Hubert tells the story of the man who falls from the fiftieth floor and to calm himself he keeps repeating “so far, so good” for every level he passes. It’s not the fall you have to worry about, it’s the landing.

And that is the overall metaphor for the entire sequence of events.

The frustration and pointlessness of their lives is evident in the way ot all plays out around them, the way the police and reporters and outsiders are seen as a threat, and there’s some pride in “their part of town”, but at the same time they hate it there. Vinz calls himself a street-kid and means it. School never did him any good and he won’t get out of there. Hubert desperately wants to get out, but during the riots the gym where he boxes has been burnt down and that seems to symbolize his hopes of getting away being destroyed. Said’s big brother is something of a leader in the gang-culture we’ve landed in, but Said is mostly a fuck-up and a petty criminal who doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

There is of course significance in the fact that the three are friends, despite them being one jew, one arab and a black kid, they have more in common in being outcast and disenfranchised than what separates them. That’s not the way these things usually look, but it still makes a point.

Vinz keeps saying he will shot a cop and Hubert keeps trying to tell him how foolish that is, but they never seem to get to the crux of the thing until very, very late in the game when Vinz actually realizes he can’t pull the trigger.

That doesn’t mean there is a happy ending here. Of course there isn’t.

It doesn’t mean there are any clear back and white answers to who is the good guys and who is a bad guy either. The police are not always particularly nice and the fires started in the ghetto actually only target the ghettos own inhabitants, like a rabbit gnawing its own foot while caught in a trap. The pointlessness in hitting out at someone doesn’t really help.

Sadly, there’s a real life tangent here. I stumbled into a documentary about urban city kids and there’s not a lot of distinction between that and this movie. Some of the arguments felt the same, sounded the same, which means this is close enough to realism for it to be of weight. What struck me as particularly poignant was the way media treats anything that happens in this kind of environment. The kids in the documentary and the kids in La Haine said pretty much the same thing – media makes a chicken out of a feather when something happens, they give all the negative aspects a lot of time and room, but never mention any of the many positive things that actually happen too.  It’s that whole art/life thing.

Well worth the time, is what I would say about this one.  Tragic, gritty and actually quite funny along the way.

MULE

Blueberry

Directed by Jan Kounen 2004. Starring Vincent Cassel as Mike Blueberry, Juliette Lewis as Maria Sullivan, Michael Madsen as Wallace Blount, Temouera Morrison as Runi.

This is one of those movies. You’re either going to buy into it or you will hate it.

It has an excellent cast, complete with Ernest Borgnine (sheriff) Eddie Izzard (Prosit), Tchécky Karyo (uncle) and Geoffrey Lewis (Greg Sullivan) in supporting roles.

It is visually stunning. I mean it. It might have something to do with it being based on a comic by Moebius, who is actually involved in the project on the writer list.

Let’s get something straight right from the get go. This is a Western. It looks absolutely incredible in that completely archaic way that has nothing to do with reality. And I, for one, like that. I don’t need realism, thank you very much. And I certainly don’t need it all the time. Just look Cassel’s body language, he could have stepped right out of the page of a Moebius strip.

The main theme is spiritual corruption and shamanism. The director saw fit to warn about this in an extra on the DVD, which I luckily didn’t see beforehand. I like to submit to the willing suspension of disbelief in cases like this. There are some pretty heady CGI graphics and stuff too that seem to rile people judging from what I’ve seen in the viewer response. I don’t mind these either, they have managed to keep them pretty organic and that fits with the general theme of spirit journeys or shamanistic trance. Drug induced visions. Pretty stuff.

Even if this is a standard cowboy-meets-Indian-lore story it does take it’s own tack on it and again, stunning visuals. I don’t mean just the visionary elements, but more than that the overall look and feel. The Indians deep in the forest, the cowboys in the desert, the townfolks in the settlement. Crossroads where they bump into each other… all of it has its own look and texture.

There are several elements to the story. One is revenge, another love, another greed. You could probably find all the sins of the flesh in there without looking too hard. Good cowboy western movies usually have some kind of revenge theme going on. In this case the big conflict is between Blueberry and Blount. It has a nice twist to it once you get into the spiritual realm. There are several other minor conflicts going on at the same time – towns folk versus Indians, law and order versus crooks. We also have the saloon girl and the respectable lady, the corrupt landowner and all the standard accoutrements.

Some quirks come from the choice in casting. Cassel is given a Cajun background and that fits well with his French accent. If you can’t recognize Karyo in any other way (and it’s kind of hard to) you’ll know him too by his French. Borgnine is a funny wink at the genre and Juliette Lewis is a surprisingly convincing frontier woman.

You can make what you will of the rest of it. It is kind of hazy and dreamy in places and I generally don’t go in for stories that hinge on the notion of the noble savage. This one does not hit you upside the head with the morality of it all, and I guess that’s why it works for me.

All in all I think it deserves more attention and recognition than it has gotten so far.

Mule