Many French films place their characters in such picturesque settings-Paris, Nice-that it is easy to see them as more colorful than real. His black-and-white cinematography camera is alert, filling the frame with meaning his characters are not aware of.

As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has grown since his first film. Treated that way by the police, they respond-almost whether they want to or not. They are not bad kids, not criminals, not particularly violent (the boxer is the least violent), but they have been singled out by age, ethnicity and appearances probable troublemakers. They have no jobs, no prospects, no serious hopes of economic independence, no money, few ways to amuse themselves except by hanging out. When his younger sister’s school is burned down, Vinz's Jewish grandmother warns, “You start out like that, you'll end up not going to temple.” What underlies everything they do is the inescapable fact that they have nothing to do. They move on the periphery of riots that have started after the police shooting of an Arab youth. They have run-ins with the cops, who try to clear them off a rooftop hangout that has become such a youth center, it even has its own hot dog stand. culture because it is not French, and they do not feel very French, either.ĭuring the course of less than 24 hours, they move aimlessly through their suburb and take a brief trip to Paris. They use words like “homeboy.” Vinz gives Saida “killer haircut, like in New York.” Vinz does a De Niro imitation (“Who you talkin' to?”). These characters inhabit a world where much of the cultural furniture has been imported from America. That they hang out with one another reflects the fact that in France, friendships are as likely to be based on class as race. (Imagine how a moviegoer from Mars would misread a film like “ Driving Miss Daisy” if he knew nothing about Southern segregation.) The three heroes of “Hate” are Vinz ( Vincent Cassel), Jewish, working class Hubert ( Hubert Kounde), from Africa, a boxer, more mature than his friends, and Said ( Said Taghmaoui), from North Africa, more lighthearted than his friends. The French neo-Nazi right wing lurks in the shadows of “Hate,” providing it with an unspoken subtext for its French audiences. In America, where for all of our problems, we are long accustomed to being a melting pot, it is hard to realize how monolithic most European nations have been-especially France, where Frenchness is almost a cult, and a political leader like Jean-Marie Le Pen can roll up alarming vote totals with his anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant diatribes.

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