AI Podcast Episode: La Haine: A Timeless Reflection on Society’s Edge

Pip: There is a film that opens with a man falling from a skyscraper and reassuring himself the whole way down — and somehow that is the optimistic part.

Mara: Today we're looking at Anna Wilberforce's review of La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 black-and-white portrait of the Parisian banlieues — a film she frames squarely under the banner of cinema as social commentary.

Pip: Let's start with what the film is actually saying about society, and why it still lands.

La Haine: Society on the Way Down

Mara: The central question the review puts to us is whether a film made in 1995 about French suburban unrest can still speak to something universal — and the answer the piece builds toward is yes, because the conditions it depicts never really resolved.

Pip: The review anchors that claim in one of the film's defining lines. Hubert delivers it early, and it hangs over everything that follows: "Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!"

Mara: What that metaphor does is shift the film's moral weight from the moment of crisis to the inevitable collision at the bottom. The review reads it as a commentary on society's gradual decline — manageable in the moment, devastating at impact.

Pip: And the film earns that reading through its three leads. Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd spend roughly twenty consecutive hours drifting through the banlieue after a riot triggered by their friend Abdel's severe injury in police custody. The review is careful to distinguish the three: Vinz is rage, Hubert is reluctant wisdom, Saïd is the sardonic middle ground keeping both of them from the edge.

Mara: The review notes that Vinz consciously models himself on Travis Bickle — the posturing, the mirror, the borrowed mythology of righteous violence. Hubert, meanwhile, has already lost his boxing gym to the riots, which the piece frames as the destruction of the one concrete symbol of escape he had.

Pip: Pierre Aïm's black-and-white cinematography gets its own section in the review, and it earns it — shooting in monochrome strips the environment down to texture and shadow, which forces the social commentary forward rather than letting color aestheticize the poverty.

Mara: The score, handled largely by the French hardcore rap group Assassin, works the same way. The review describes the music as "an active participant in conveying the emotional landscape of the banlieues" — not background, but pressure.

Pip: Kassovitz won Best Director at Cannes in 1995 for this. The film also took Best Film at the Césars. The recognition was immediate, and the review's argument is that the relevance has outlasted the awards.

Mara: The themes the review maps — police brutality, systemic racism, youth disillusionment, the self-perpetuating cycle of hatred — are treated not as period details but as the film's living tissue. That's what earns it five stars and the label essential.

Pip: From one society in freefall to the broader conversation about what cinema owes its audience — that tension between art and accountability runs underneath everything here.

Mara: The through-line is cinema that refuses to look away — from the banlieues, from the fall, from the landing.

Pip: So far so good is not a survival strategy. More on what that means next time.