Événement

Hate @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Friday, March 11, 7:30 p.m.
Hate/La haine
Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995, 97 min., B&W, Blu-ray projection source

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with "Hate," 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, "Hate" is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country's ongoing identity crisis.

When the film was released, the New York Times noted that "for American viewers, the eeriest part of Mr. Kassovitz's precise and troubling film is how easily it reflects our own social problems." Because of the seemingly intractable problems it documents, "Hate" remains powerfully relevant, whether in Ferguson or France. If anything, the situation has worsened: After the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, Kassovitz stated that it was perhaps time to make "La Haine 2," but the Guardian observes that a sequel "wouldn't be a follow-up in the conventional sense but rather a much darker version of what was already a tough film."

With an introduction by Calvin Wilson, film, jazz, and dance critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; and a post-film discussion by Lionel Cuillé, the Jane and Bruce Robert professor of French and Francophone studies at Webster University; Jean-Louis Pautrot, professor of French and international studies at Saint Louis University; and Wilson.

Sponsored by Centre Francophone at Webster University