mathieu kassovitz`s la haine and the ambivalence of french–jewish

French Studies, Vol. LXI, No. 4, 476 – 491
doi:10.1093/fs/knm177
MATHIEU KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE AND THE
AMBIVALENCE OF FRENCH – JEWISH IDENTITY
SVEN-ERIK ROSE
Abstract
Two noteworthy and contradictory tendencies mark the early reception of
Jewish-French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz’s celebrated 1995 film La
Haine. On the one hand, critics touted the film’s skilful and intelligent
rendering of the grit, violence and restless boredom of life in the Parisian
banlieue. On the other hand, frequent quotations of Allen and Albert Hughes
(Menace II Society), Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Martin Scorcese (Mean
Streets, Raging Bull) and others led some within French film and hip-hop to
view Kassovitz and La Haine as all-too-self-conscious, stylized and filmicly
literate.1 As Erin Schroeder notes, ‘most of these challenges emphasize his
bourgeois family history in leftist cultural production and his previous experiences with Me´tisse (France/Belgium, 1993) and short films, so that Kassovitz
figures paradoxically as too film literate to tell an authentic story of the
banlieue’.2 The critical dichotomy Schroeder underscores between
‘authentic’ banlieue cinema on the one hand and ‘inauthentic’ film literacy on
the other elides how La Haine dramatizes precisely the subtle interpenetration
I would like to thank Bruno Chaouat, Mila Ganeva, Ole Gram, Eran Kaplan, Dan Magilow, and the
anonymous reader for comments and encouragement on earlier versions of this essay.
1
La Haine’s cinematic allusions are a commonplace of criticism of the film. Even Kassovitz’s 1990 short
Fierrot le Pou inscribes itself (ironically) in the history of high French cinema.
2
‘A Multicultural Conversation: La Haine, Raı¨, and Menace II Society’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and
Media Studies, 46 (2001), 143 – 79 (p. 153).
# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
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From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French
film director Mathieu Kassovitz is ‘authentic enough’ to speak for the ethnic banlieue.
Yet La Haine is preoccupied with this very anxiety. This article examines how the
film self-reflexively explores the place of Jewishness in the social crisis it dramatizes.
La Haine achieves this ‘Jewish’ self-reflexivity primarily through the relationship its
arguably most fully realized character, Vinz (a working-class Ashkenazi Jew), entertains to his more visibly ethnic friends Saı̈d (an Arab) and Hubert (a black African).
As Vinz navigates the complicated terrain of adolescent relationships striving to
become ‘real’, in other words, ethnic, masculine, authentic, the film also searches
for a place for Jewish identity a generation after the ambivalent Jewish encounter
with May 1968 and beyond. Vinz’s ambivalent locus between, on the one hand,
other minority figures with whom he wishes problematically to identify and, on
the other, the privilege of whiteness vis-à-vis which he occupies a position of
complex and uneasy proximity exemplifies a wider crisis of French Jews on the
Left. The article concludes with a discussion of this crisis and how La Haine
situates itself in the history of post-war Left Jewish politics in France.
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
477
3
For discussions of how mediatization and filmic sophistication relate to ‘authenticity’ in La Haine, see
Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Designs on the Banlieue: Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995)’, in Susan Hayward
and Ginette Vincendeau, eds, French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd edn (New York, Routledge, 2000),
pp. 310 –27, and Sanjay Sharma and Ashwani Sharma, ‘ “So Far So Good . . .” La Haine and the Poetics of
the Everyday’, Theory, Culture & Society, 17 (2000), 103 – 16 (pp. 108 –11). Schroeder concludes that La
Haine’s ‘representational strategies tend to consume the film’, in ‘A Multicultural Conversation’, pp. 175 –
76. With far less nuance, Karen Alexander, ‘La Haine’, Vertigo 1:5 (Autumn/winter 1995), pp. 45– 46.
lambasts La Haine for mistaking style and mediation with reality, as if these were neatly separable: ‘the
problem comes when the cinema, music, TV and youth magazines stand in for people’s lived experience
of the world, and become self-reflexive mirrors’ (p. 46). In fairness to Alexander, part of the reason she
sees in La Haine nothing more than ‘an American film which has been badly transplanted’ may have to
do with the subtitling, which draws heavily on the idiom of American ’hood movies. On the subtitling of
La Haine, see Anne Jäckel, ‘The Subtitling of La Haine: A Case Study’, in Yves Gambier and Henrik
Gottlieb, eds, (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts, Practices and Research (Amsterdam — Philadelphia,
Benjamins, 2001), pp. 223 – 35.
4
‘L’Origine dévoilée du discours sur la violence et sur les relations interethniques dans le cinéma de
Kassovitz’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 8 (2004), 63 – 73 (p. 71).
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of ‘reality’ and ‘image’. Importantly, the film explores the roles and effects of
mediatized images, fantasy, quotation and (self-)stylization within — as an
integral part of, rather than in opposition to — its diegetic reality. For not
only does Kassovitz quote from a range of pop culture texts, all the main characters in La Haine do so as well. To posit any realm of social or ethnic ‘authenticity’ uncontaminated by the complexities, ironies and mediating
technologies of contemporary life only rehearses early twentieth-century
models of European and American primitivism. Against such a tendency,
La Haine underscores intricate connections between would-be ‘brute’ reality,
mass-mediated representations, and individual consciousness and experience.
Kassovitz’s film deftly exposes categories such as social authenticity,
ethnicity and masculinity as sites of self-doubt. ‘Finding oneself’ — subjectively, intersubjectively and socio-politically — is a project that necessarily
involves negotiating the reality of media images and the fantasies and
desires they play off of and propel.3
Yet as Johann Saddock argues in a fine article, La Haine’s strategy of undercutting ethnic stereotypes so as to deprive them of any determinist importance
may have its own ironic origin in Kassovitz’s Jewishness, a notoriously
slippery ethnic category in-between France’s visible non-white minorities
and its white Catholic majority. ‘Les distorsions et les anomalies sociologiques
qui ont souvent été relevées dans le discours de Kassovitz’, Saddock
concludes, ‘résultent de ce qu’il est difficile d’échapper à son origine
ethnique’.4 The reading of La Haine that I propose complements Saddock’s
assessment of how the peculiar status of French Jewishness explains many
of the sociological anomalies in La Haine. From the film’s release, critics
have discounted Kassovitz as not authentic enough to speak for the ethnic
banlieue, yet what such critics have missed is La Haine’s central preoccupation
with this very anxiety. I examine how the film self-reflexively asks what place
Jewishness can rightly take up in the film’s own cultural politics. La Haine
achieves this ‘Jewish’ self-reflexivity most effectively by highlighting the problematic relationship its arguably most fully realized character, Vinz (a
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SVEN-ERIK ROSE
La Haine is acutely cognizant of its own representational practices — a self-reflexivity able to
engender a (postmodern) authenticity. But we argue that this belies the film’s complicity in
producing an aestheticized account of ‘ghetto life’ predicated on potent racialized signifiers:
(sub)urban crisis, the banlieue, aggressive black masculinity and hip-hop culture.7
My reading does not dispute, but does complicate, this critique. Only when we
take seriously the ambivalent position that Vinz takes up as a Jewish character
and that Kassovitz occupies as a Jewish filmmaker can we fully appreciate the
extent to which La Haine both uses the other to authenticate itself (as Sharma
and Sharma rightly argue) and reflects on the possibilities, limits and ethical
ambiguities of that move. Vinz’s quest and the film itself, that is, are utterly
preoccupied with their own problematic (Jewish) relationship to (visible)
ethnic ‘authenticity’.8
5
Bérénice Reynaud’s surmise that Vinz is ‘probably a Sephardi from North Africa’ is certainly odd, yet
Reynaud may be straining to ‘correct’ Kassovitz’s anachronistic placement of Yiddish-accented Jews in
the banlieue of the mid-1990s, an act of chronological syncope that, as I remark upon in my conclusion, juxtaposes the banlieues of the 1990s with those of the interwar years. See ‘le ’hood: Hate and Its Neighbors’, Film
Comment, 32 (1996), 54– 58 (p. 54). Were Vinz’s family part of the later wave of North African Jewish immigrants, his social locus might be more plausible, but this would also completely alter the nature of Vinz’s
identity crisis that I discuss in this article, which has much to do with a long history of stereotypes about
specifically Ashkenazic masculinity.
6
In her elegant essay, ‘The Post-Holocaust Jew in the Age of Postcolonialism: La Haine Revisited’, Studies
in French Cinema, 5 (2005), 137 – 47, Yosefa Loshitzky has recently taken up many of the concerns I also
address in this essay, including the film’s representation of French-Jewish masculinity and off-whiteness.
Where Loshitzky convincingly illuminates the legacy of the Holocaust in the film’s treatment of (Jewish)
identity and ethics, my reading exposes an intergenerational plot in the Jewish engagement with Left
cultural politics in France.
7
‘“So Far So Good . . .” La Haine and the Poetics of the Everday’, Theory, Culture & Society, 17 (2000), 103 –
16 (p. 105). Sharma and Sharma find especially in its deployment of music that La Haine ‘trades on a reflexive
aesthetic strategy but disavows its own position and location as a text re-presenting ghetto life. . .. The music
in La Haine does offer a particular political imaginary, but at the same time it is used to authenticate itself — a
disembodied text seeking to know the other intimately while obfuscating its own representational practices’
(p. 113).
8
Sharma and Sharma rightly argue that ‘the aesthetic of realism is central to the representations of the black
male body in action. In mainstream (white) society it is a consequence of the waning of affect — the literal
loss of the real in a media-saturated culture. In this context the black male body signifies a “realness” — an
authenticity — in which the ambivalence of meaning is halted’ (‘ “So Far, So Good” ’, p. 109). I would only
add that in Vinz La Haine interrogates — and does not (only) fall prey to — this attempt to compensate for
the loss of the real through fetishizing the violent authenticity of the black male body. As Ginette Vincendeau
notes, La Haine in this way continues — in a more serious and politicized manner — the theme of Fierrot le
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working-class Ashkenazi Jew), entertains to his more visibly ethnic friends
Saı̈d (an Arab) and Hubert (a black African).5 As Vinz navigates the complicated terrain of adolescent relationships and masculine identity striving to
become ‘real’ — ethnic, masculine, authentic — the film also searches for a
place for Jewish identity a generation after the ambivalent Jewish encounter
with the culturalpolitics of May 1968.6
In a nuanced reading of La Haine, Sanjay Sharma and Ashwani Sharma see
the film as a complexly self-reflexive text that nevertheless fetishizes racial
otherness to create aesthetic effects of hyper-real ‘ghetto’ life. They argue
that the film does not analyse in adequately lucid historical and political
terms the racial conflicts they see at the heart of the social conflict La Haine
stages.
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
479
Pou, about a wannabe-black Woody-Allen-ish klutz who fantasizes inhabiting a strong, athletic, black body to
finally impress the young woman-of-colour ballplayer with whom he is smitten and who obviously finds him
at best mildly humorous, in ‘Designs on the Banlieue’, p. 322.
9
Though I interpret the significance of Vinz’s character differently than Carrie Tarr, I agree with her that ‘it
is Vinz who generates the narrative tension’. See ‘Ethnicity and Identity in Me´tisse and La Haine by Mathieu
Kassovitz’, in Tony Chafer, ed., Multicultural France (Portsmouth, School of Language and Area Studies,
1997), pp. 40 – 47 (p. 45).
10
Mathieu Kassovitz, Jusqu’ici tout va bien . . .: sce´nario et photographies autour du film ‘La Haine’ (Arles, Actes
Sud, 1995), p. 58. References to Kassovtiz’s screenplay — which, it should be noted, differs from some
on-screen dialogue — are hereafter given in parentheses in the text.
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La Haine’s plot is easily summarized. The action takes place in a
twenty-four-hour period following riots in a cite´ between police and marginalized youth. We follow a day in the lives of the ethnically diverse Saı̈d,
Hubert and Vinz as they go about their unstructured, depressing and bored
daily lives in the banlieue and later as they venture into central Paris. There
they pass a night getting into various kinds of trouble with a mercurial drug
dealer, racist police officers, young men from the local hip-hop scene, representatives of the Parisian art world, skinheads and, constantly, with each other.
Two elements create suspense. First, beaten by police during the riots,
Abdel Ichaha, an Arab acquaintance of the three protagonists, hovers in the
hospital between life and death. Second, Vinz has recovered a pistol lost by
a police officer during the previous night’s unrest. Throughout the film,
Vinz fantasizes about shooting a cop in retaliation should Abdel die. Upon
returning ‘home’ after their ill-fated night in Paris, Vinz seems to have
overcome his revenge fantasies. He gives the pistol to Hubert, the most levelheaded and mature of the three. Ironically, it is at this point that Vinz’s
longed-for violent encounter occurs, albeit not as he had imagined it. Police
officers with whom banlieue youths including Saı̈d, Vinz and Hubert had
exchanged words the previous day discover Vinz vulnerably alone. While
apparently meaning only to scare and harass him, one accidentally fires a
bullet into Vinz’s temple, killing him instantly. Hubert comes, albeit too
late, to Vinz’s aid, and the film ends in a standoff between Hubert and the
officer who has just killed Vinz. As they aim their pistols at each other, the
screen goes blank and we hear a gun shot, the precise — but no matter
what, bleak — results of which we do not learn.
Vinz’s ‘quest for the real’ largely propels and structures La Haine’s drama
and lends the film its quality of suspenseful doom.9 It is the floating signifier
of the gun that Vinz recovers and his fantasy of using it to kill a cop that
drives the minimal plot. (Significantly, Vinz carries the pistol in his jeans
and handles it, according to directions in the screenplay, ‘avec l’adresse de
quelqu’un qui a vu trop de films’.10) The conflicts between the three youths
are generally precipitated by Vinz’s violent desires and racialized fantasies,
with which Saı̈d and Hubert must contend. It is Vinz’s brush with the
policeman in the cite´ that prompts their flight into Paris, Vinz’s wish to
prove his street credentials that provides the central drama in the trio’s
480
SVEN-ERIK ROSE
11
‘Designs on the Banlieue’, pp. 319, 315.
‘Ethnicity and Identity in Me´tisse and La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz’, p. 46.
Schroeder’s remarks on Kassovitz’s privileging of whiteness likewise fail to consider the specifically
Jewish nature of that whiteness and how it is problematized in La Haine: ‘The weight of Kassovitz’s own
white ethnic identity can be read in its projection onto the central position of Vinz within the narrative.
This hypothesis becomes even more convincing when attention to Kassovitz’s earlier work, from shorts
like Cauchemar Blanc (France, 1991) and Fierrot le Pou (France 1990) to his first feature film, Me´tisse, reveals
his preoccupation with white characters in multicultural stories’, in ‘A Multicultural Conversation’, p. 164.
12
13
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encounter with skinheads, and Vinz’s renunciation of his powerful fantasy that
sets up the film’s jarring dénouement.
Vinz’s quest for violently authentic experience betrays deep anxiety about a
possible masculine and ethnic deficit that stems from his ambivalent identity
and social position as a French Jew. Vinz constantly seeks (in mirrors, on television and movie screens, in private fantasies) images that confirm his
toughness and ‘authenticity’. Ginette Vincendeau notes ‘Vinz’s obsession
with watching the riots on television’ as well as his exaggerated performance
of masculinity — he ‘spits, picks his nose, punches Hubert’s punch-bag or the
air’.11 Several critics have objected to the way the narrative and focalization of
La Haine privileges Vinz’s character over those of Hubert or Saı̈d. The privileging of Vinz indeed raises certain issues about the relative treatment of
different ethnic characters. Nevertheless, to see in it merely an indication of
the film’s inauthenticity fails to appreciate one of La Haine’s fundamental preoccupations: the film constantly explores precisely the profound connection
between Vinz’s peculiar perspective and the ambivalence of his Jewish
identity. For example, Carrie Tarr argues that ‘from a minority standpoint
. . . the marginalising of ethnic and cultural differences and the subordination
of the black and Beur roles in favour of the role of the white youth may mean
that the film’s value is more limited’.12 Although well-intended and in many
ways legitimate, this critique brushes aside Vinz’s ambivalent Jewish
identity. It recuperates Vinz into a simple white/not-white binary opposition.13
In fact, La Haine explores in a subtle and sustained way Vinz’s own complex
ethnicity as it informs his relationship to his visibly ethnic friends. La Haine
does not simply privilege Vinz and unproblematic whiteness but rather dramatizes Vinz’s experience of a problematic, Jewish off-whiteness and the vexed
relationship to (phantasms of) masculine and ethnic ‘authenticity’ this ambivalent ethnic inscription inspires.
In a scene that provides a crucial window into Vinz’s psyche, Vinz dreams
himself performing an improvised break dance to klezmer music. Katya
Zisserman and Colin Nettelbeck understand La Haine to be organized
according to an agonistic opposition between the appropriative or colonizing
tendencies of consumer culture and the contestatory thrust of popular cultural
forms. They interpret Vinz’s dream-dancing as his form of popular culture
akin to Saı̈d’s tagging and Hubert’s boxing. ‘Vinz’s dream, at the
beginning, is of carefree, joyous, Jewish-Russian folk dancing, a form of
mobility, skill, and athleticism that is nothing short of total transcendence in
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
481
No doubt by investing his Jewish character with such qualities, Kassovitz runs the risk of being
taxed with the charge that he is projecting his own desires into Vinz. Perhaps it is more relevant
that, through the figure of Vinz, as with the other protagonists, he is positioning his work in a
way that gives (at least) as much impetus to aesthetic and ethical concepts as to the particular
lives of the characters.15 (94)
To foreclose in this manner on questions of projection, however, leaves unexplored the considerable part of La Haine that deals precisely with questions of
(inter-ethnic) projection and fantasy. Given the complexity of Vinz’s own
dream sequence, Kassovitz may well ‘project’ himself into Vinz, though not
as a figure who embodies a triumphant version of Kassovitz’s own ethnic
identity. Instead, through the complex work of projection and fantasy in
which Vinz engages vis-à-vis his more visibly marked ethnic counterparts,
Kassovitz explores the socio-cultural ambiguities and concomitant insecurities
that inform his own work as a socially engaged Jewish filmmaker.
Vinz’s phantasmal quest for the experience of ‘reality’ or ‘authenticity’,
which causes him to flirt with violence and images of violence and throughout
the film to romanticize racial and ethnic otherness, must be understood to a
significant degree as an attempt to resolve the ambivalence of his Jewish
identity. Zygmunt Bauman aptly points out the resonance between
phenomena that cause vexation by failing to fit into established categories
and the popular imagination of the Jews.
There is a certain correspondence, a certain affinity between the endemic underdetermination,
under-definition of the protean phenomena (one may say that they are indefinable by
definition — since they explode the very categories meant to service the defining business),
14
‘Social Exclusion and Artistic Inclusiveness: The Quest for Integrity in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine’,
Nottingham French Studies, 36 (1997), 83 –98 (p. 94).
15
‘Social Exclusion and Artistic Inclusiveness’, p. 94.
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relation to his actual recumbent, gangling, and rather stultified looking
position when he first appears’.14 It seems strained, however, to see in
Vinz’s dream a self-image of triumphant transcendence when we consider
that the moves Vinz comically performs expose him to be a Jewish dork in
hip-hop garb. Vinz’s dream is far more ironic, insecure and self-questioning
than ‘carefree and joyous’. In his dreamt self-image, Vinz is not the ultra-tough
authentic youth-from-the-street he tries to be in his waking hours. On the
contrary, just as the scene itself conspicuously interrupts the hyper-real
aesthetic of La Haine, Vinz appears to himself in it as a schlemiel who
might be quite out of place in the gritty world of the banlieue. In contrast to
boxing and tagging, klezmer dancing has no street credentials.
Significantly, Zisserman and Nettelbeck anticipate and deflect the potential
charge that Kassovitz might be projecting his own desires into Vinz. They
argue that Vinz, like Saı̈d and Hubert, takes up a position within the contest
the film stages between popular and commercial cultural politics, and that
this opposition should be understood in aesthetic and ethical terms that
largely transcend the characters’ particular circumstances.
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SVEN-ERIK ROSE
. . . and the categorical elusiveness of the Jews who tend to sit astride all the usual divides and
elide all the criteria normally deployed to draw them.16
Darty: Allez brûler les cars des flics au lieu de vous en prendre à nous.
Vinz: Je te rappelle qu’il y en a un des nôtres qui est en train de crever.
Darty: Mais c’est pas mon problème, ça. Mon problème c’est d’aller au boulot le matin avec ma
voiture. (p. 55)
After the three youths learn that Abdel has died, Hubert and Saı̈d refuse to
endorse Vinz’s plan to shoot a cop in retaliation. Vinz protests too much
that, unlike them, ‘MOI JE SAIS QUI JE SUIS, JE SAIS D’OÙ JE
VIENS . . .’ (p. 160; original emphasis).
Moreover, Hubert and Saı̈d each have occasion to call Vinz on his problematic romanticization of and identification with racial others. In a scene in
which Vinz gives Saı̈d an ill-fated haircut, he tells him that he does not
want to be the next Arab to be lynched at a police station. Saı̈d responds
sarcastically.
Saı̈d: Tu vas vraiment fumer un flic si Abdel meurt?
Vinz: Tu veux être le prochain reubeu à se faire lyncher dans un commissariat?
Saı̈d: Non.
Vinz: Ben moi non plus.
Saı̈d: (moqueur) Toi non plus tu veux pas être le prochain reubeu à se faire lyncher? (p. 89)
16
‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’, in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds, Modernity,
Culture, and ‘the Jew’ (Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 143 – 56 (p. 144).
17
On the construction of the Jewish male as weak, diseased and insufficiently masculine, see Sander
Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton University Press, 1993). See also Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic
Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1997), which revisits the tradition of the ‘sissy Jew’ as a positive model for contemporary Jewish
masculinity.
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La Haine invites its viewers to consider why Vinz identifies with phantasms of
hyper-real ethnic otherness. These phantasms are borne of two concurrent
impulses. Generally, they address his need to escape the radically ambivalent
underdetermination of his Jewishness. Specifically, they stage his coming to
terms with a long tradition of insufficiently masculine Ashkenazi males.17
Vinz clearly finds his brush with ‘reality’ in all its violent immediacy during
the riots exhilarating. He breathlessly recounts the scene to Hubert: ‘On les [les
flics] a déchirés, moi j’en ai retourné un, je l’ai fumé ce bâtard . . . T’aurais dû
être là Hubert, on aurait bien eu besoin de toi, c’était trop puissant’ (p. 27). In
marked contrast to Saı̈d’s and Hubert’s more circumspect positions on retaliation, Vinz is steadfast and fervent about the need to avenge Abdel’s (first
potential, then actual) death. He frequently expresses feelings of exaggerated
solidarity with the victim of police violence, whereas Hubert and Saı̈d
remain conspicuously more detached and cautious. It is Vinz who upbraids
an acquaintance of all three, the fence nicknamed ‘Darty’, for having skewed
priorities because he bemoans the destruction of his car in the riots when
‘one of theirs’ is dying:
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
483
Vinz: Alors le juge il m’a proposé, soit un mois ferme et deux mois de sursis, soit de faire des
trucs de travaux machins, pour la ville.
Hubert: Des travaux d’intérêt général.
Vinz: T’en as fait toi?
Hubert re´pond par la ne´gative.
Vinz: Non, moi non plus je veux pas en faire. Nique leur mère à ces bâtards. Je préfère un mois
de placard, t’es pas d’accord?
Hubert: Un mois de placard c’est long Vinz.
Vinz: C’est pas grave, je vais bouffer tranquille et puis de toute façon j’ai rien à faire dehors . . . Et
puis je suis un des derniers à ne pas avoir fait de zonzon.
Hubert: Tirer un mois pour vol à la tire, c’est pas super-glorieux.
Vinz: C’est pas à ton niveau, mais c’est déjà ça.
Hubert: J’ai jamais fait de placard moi.
Vinz: Parce que tu t’es jamais fait coincer.
Hubert: Parce que je me suis arrêté à temps. (p. 32)
Feeling a need to earn an outsider status that corresponds only ambiguously to
his Ashkenazi identity, Vinz compensates. He pigeonholes the black Hubert as
the masculine and racial stereotype he wishes to emulate. Vinz tries to resolve
his own ambiguous position between victim and beneficiary of white French
privilege through identifications with fantasies of ‘truly’ Other others.
On the commuter train to central Paris, Vinz recounts to Saı̈d (with the
effects of adrenaline still evident) the brush with the police he and Hubert
have just had — the immediate reason they fled into central Paris:
Le keuf était au bout de mon flingue, je te jure, comme je te vois. Le bâtard. Il bougeait pas, il a
certainement chié dans son froc . . . Si Hubert avait pas bougé, je l’aurais fumé sans hésitation.
T’aurais vu ça. Hubert il l’a retourné, le keuf il a pas dû y croire, deux lascars comme il en a
jamais vu. (Il se penche vers Hubert.) T’as trop assuré Hubert, t’as fait trop fort.
Hubert ne re´pond pas. (p. 95)
Given Vinz’s peculiar romanticization of Hubert, the giddy satisfaction he
feels has as much to do with having had a violent encounter together with
Hubert as it has to do with the encounter itself. If earlier Vinz wished that
Hubert could have been there with him during the riots (presumably to authenticate the experience), and if he wants to serve time in order to approximate
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Later in the bathroom of a Parisian café, Vinz explains his commitment to
violent retaliation as a refusal to be the victim of racial violence. He tells
Saı̈d ‘Je m’appelle pas Malik Oussekine’ (an Algerian-French student
murdered by French police in 1986 at the age of 22), ‘je vais pas me faire
défoncer dans une cave’ (p. 113).
Vinz’s attraction to the phantasmal ‘reality’ of the experience of racial others
manifests itself above all, however, in his relationship to Hubert. Speaking to
Hubert about the possible consequences of a recent arrest, he says, much to
Hubert’s consternation, that he will opt to do time rather than perform
community service. He clearly fetishizes Hubert as a black man. He wrongly
assumes that his friend has been incarcerated and that he, Vinz, is therefore
‘not in [Hubert’s] league’.
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J’ai voulu faire quelque chose que je n’ai pas très bien réussi: je voulais que le film soit vu par la
personne la plus en retrait, qui observe ce qui se passe, mais sans juger. Je voulais qu’il soit vu
par Hubert. Il y a de nombreux moments où on observe les choses à travers le point de vue
d’Hubert, à travers la façon dont il regarde: quand il fume un joint, par exemple, il voit les
chose d’une façon différente . . . On ne pouvait pas faire un film qui s’appelle La Haine avec
trois personnages et adopter le point de vue de Vinz: c’était impossible, ça fermait
complètement les portes. Il fallait contrebalancer par un regard extérieur, et le plus extérieur
possible, c’était celui d’Hubert.18
Kassovitz wanted and largely failed to focalize the narrative through Hubert
paradoxically as a figure — or fantasy — of exteriority. Hubert’s point of
view is ‘un regard extérieur . . . le plus extérieur possible’. Kassovitz says
frankly that Vinz cannot carry a film called La Haine — with all the gritty
realism the title implies — about three characters (two of whom are not
white). Vinz remains inside his own head; focalizing through him would
‘shut all the doors’. The only way for him — and with him La Haine — to
enter reality/exteriority is to see through (a fantasy of) Hubert’s eyes. Both
Vinz’s desire to identify with Hubert, and Kassovitz’s desire to focalize
through him, that is, amount to an impossible wish to interiorize an embodiment of pure exteriority. To ‘get inside’ Hubert would be to get outside. In
contrast to Vinz’s ‘inauthentic’ interiority, Hubert’s subjectivity would turn
itself inside out, exteriorize itself, would be real.
Vinz’s quest for the real and the complex way Hubert is implicated in this
search is likewise evident in the shear giddiness Vinz initially feels when he
beats up a skinhead played by Kassovitz himself. Once again, Vinz wants to
prove himself to his own fantasy of Hubert.
Hubert: Qu’est-ce que tu fais Vinz?
Vinz: Tu te fous de ma gueule, tu me crois pas capable de faire ce que je dis . . . Je vais te prouver
le contraire. (p. 178)
At this point, Hubert ceases to caution restraint. He instead eggs Vinz on. The
screenplay leaves no doubt — ‘on sent qu’il vient de tenter un coup de poker qui aurait
pu mal tourner’ (p. 179) — that Hubert assumes the role of a sort of street-wise
psychiatrist and takes a calculated risk aimed to break the spell of Vinz’s
18
Thomas Bourguignon and Yann Tobin, ‘Les cinq dernières secondes: entretien avec Mathieu Kassovitz’,
Positif, 412, (June 1995), 8 – 13 (p. 9).
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his image of Hubert’s ‘niveau’, here he tries to enlist Hubert to co-own ‘their’
recent experience. Typically, Hubert is troubled and alienated by Vinz’s fetishization of violence and of himself as the embodiment of authentic, violent
masculinity.
In an interview with Positif, Kassovitz remarks on his own desire to focalize
the film through Hubert. Kassovitz’s — unrealized and perhaps unrealizable
— directorial desire to achieve through Hubert ‘un regard extérieur’ strikingly
parallels Vinz’s strained relationship to Hubert as the embodiment of
authenticity.
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
485
19
Susan Morrison, ‘La Haine, Fallen Angels, and some Thoughts on Scorsese’s Children’, Cine Action 139
(1995), pp. 44– 50. On Kassovitz’s self-casting as a skinhead, see also Johann Sadock, ‘L’Origine dévoilée du
discours sur la violence et sur les relations interethniques dans le cinéma de Kassovitz’, p. 64, and Thomas
Bourguignon and Yann Tobin, ‘Les cinq dernières secondes: entretien avec Mathieu Kassovitz’, p. 11.
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phantasmic relationship to violence and to himself, Hubert, as its fetishized
embodiment.
It is important that Kassovitz makes an ironic appearance in the film as the
skinhead whom Vinz is ultimately unable to murder, for the standoff that
ensues between Vinz and the skinhead dramatizes precisely the ambivalent
relationship French Jews maintain with white French privilege. With his
head shorn ‘skin-head close’, as Susan Morrison has observed (50), Vince
Cassel, the actor who plays Vinz, and Kassovitz in the role of the skinhead
resemble each other remarkably.19 In keeping with La Haine’s leitmotif of
mirrors and mirroring, Vinz and the skinhead (Kassovitz) mirror each other
with irresolvable ambivalence and indeed hostility. The standoff is not
resolved in an act of supremely decisive violence but rather in visceral
disgust — Vinz vomits. In this ambiguous reaction, we can see both Vinz’s
acknowledgement of the skinhead’s humanity and right to live, as well as
his own inescapable share in white French privilege. Vinz, who seeks to
escape his ‘authenticity deficit’ through attempts to see himself reflected in
the image of Hubert that he himself projects, finally has to confront an inescapable aspect of himself in the face of the skinhead. This ambivalent selfrecognition is a turning point that breaks the spell of Vinz’s romance of
violence.
Throughout the film, Vinz has tried to fuse his fantasy of brute violence symbolized by the phallic pistol with his idealization of (above all) Hubert as the
embodiment of social and ethnic authenticity into a viable imago that would
rescue him from the ambivalence of his perceived masculine and ethnic
deficit as a Jew. Hubert has consistently refused that phantasmal fusion of masculinity, ethnicity and authenticity and has finally brought Vinz to see its limitations. After Hubert has broken the spell of the phallic fantasy by calling Vinz’s
bluff, as it were, in the encounter with the skinhead, Vinz gives the gun to
Hubert in a symbolically complex gesture at the end of the film. When Vinz
hands the gun to Hubert, he fuses the two most powerful signifiers of his
quest for ethnic and masculine authenticity. Yet in doing so, he does not
complete the quest but rather abandons it.
Were the film to end here, we would have a sort of compressed Bildungsroman
in which confused young men mature and become equipped to enter into a
constructive relationship with society. However, as we know, a fate awaits
La Haine’s ‘heroes’ that is more abrupt, jarring, and ironic than the end
Hans Castorp meets in Thomas Mann’s anguished parody of the genre in
Der Zauberberg. The fact that Vinz’s longed-for encounter with the real
comes only after he has worked through his fantasy and given the gun to
Hubert says more than that the real is by definition never where we imagine
486
SVEN-ERIK ROSE
20
Zisserman and Nettelbeck note that La Haine is structured as a classical tragedy: ‘Social Exclusion and
Artistic Inclusiveness’, p. 96; and Tom Conley and Jenny Lefcourt remark that ‘the fact that the film obeys
the Aristotelian “unities” in its circumspection of time, space, and action prompts the viewer to wonder if
indeed the affiliation with classical drama enhances its pathos’, in ‘La Haine and the Caméra-Graffito’, Contemporary French Civilization, 12 (1998), 227 –39 (p. 231).
21
When the train taking them to Siberia stops, everyone jumps out to take a shit. The shy Grunwalski,
however, ventures too far away from the train and is literally caught with his pants down as it takes off.
As he runs after it holding up his pants, he is confronted with a catch 22: whenever he reaches out his
hands to board the train, his pants fall down. When he pulls them up, the train advances. Ultimately Grunwalski misses the train and freezes to death. Zisserman and Nettelbeck interpret the story as a mark of the
film’s own faith in story-telling: ‘There is a deep and admirable humanity at work here that demands the
right that each individual life should have, as it were, a personally named story. Vinz and (probably)
Hubert, like Grunwalski, will die absurd deaths — but they will not disappear without leaving a trace’, in
‘Social Exclusion and Artistic Inclusiveness’, p. 97. Vincendeau somewhat mistakenly describes the old
man’s story as being ‘about the Holocaust’, as it is in fact predominately about being sent to Siberia,
‘Designs on the Banlieue’, p. 318. Tarr sees it as ‘an attempt to equate Vinz’s cultural inheritance of
injustice and oppression as the equivalent of the injustice and oppression experienced by blacks and Beurs
in contemporary France. . .. An apparently pointless story, it nevertheless serves to remind the audience of
the horrors suffered by the Jews as a consequence of European anti-semitism and thus provides Vinz
with street credibility’, in ‘Ethnicity and Identity in Me´tisse and La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz’, p. 45.
An admittedly perplexed Schroeder ventures: ‘Perhaps the story is a commentary on the strategic choices
necessary among immigrant populations who must decide, metaphorically, whether to jump on the train
or hold their pants up’, in ‘A Multicultural Conversation’, p. 172.
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it. It also acknowledges the social limitations of such growth: soon media
reports about the latest police bavure will broadcast images of Vinz and
Hubert that will recuperate into crude stereotypes the subtlety with which
they have negotiated the spell of just such images. In death, Vinz will be a
mere statistic; and dead or alive, Hubert will be reduced ‘definitively’ to the
jeune noir de la banlieue.
Vinz’s ambivalent locus between, on the one hand, other minority figures
with whom he shows solidarity to the point of problematic identification
and, on the other, the privilege of whiteness vis-à-vis which he finds himself
in a position of complex and uneasy proximity exemplifies a wider crisis of
French Jews on the Left. An enigmatic scene in La Haine involving a
Holocaust survivor and victim of Stalin self-consciously inscribes the film in
the history of post-war Left Jewish politics in France. The scene introduces
a twofold historical perspective into the film that otherwise, however ironically, respects the classical unities.20 An older gentleman emerges from a
stall in the bathroom of a Parisian café and tells the three non-plussed
youths, in Yiddish-accented French, an anecdote about himself and his
friend Grunwalski being deported to Siberia. Critics have interpreted the
scene in the most various ways.21 Yet no one to my knowledge has sought
to understand it within the broader context of the political and cultural
projects that animated Left-minded French Jews from the 1960s through the
1980s. Yaı̈r Auron has demonstrated both that Jews were centrally involved
in the radical-Left movements in France of the 1960s and 1970s, and that the
legacy of the Shoah was a driving force behind the commitment to radical
forms of social and political contestation of this generation of child
survivors and children of survivors. Moreover, the void left by the general
collapse of universalist gauchisme in its various forms in the early 1970s, a
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
487
22
See Les Juifs d’extreˆme gauche en mai 68, trans. by Katherine Werchowski (Paris, Albin Michel, 1998), p. 287.
Auron’s is the most comprehensive study of Jewish involvement in May 1968 and after. See also Jonathan
Judaken, ‘May ’68: The Jewish Sub-Text’, in Barry Rothaus, ed., Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the
Western Society for French History: Selected Papers of the Annual Meeting, volume 30 (Greeley, The University
Press of Colorado, 2004), pp. 235 – 41; Jonathan Judaken, ‘ “To be or not to be French”: Soixante-huitard
Reflections on “la question juive” ’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 1 (2002), 3– 21; and Alain Finkielkraut,
Le Juif imaginaire, second edn (Paris, Seuil, 1983).
23
See, for example, Carrie Tarr, ‘Ethnicity and Identity in Me´tisse and La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz’,
p. 45, and Bérénice Reynaud, ‘le ’hood: Hate and Its Neighbors’, p. 57.
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void that has largely been filled by struggles for human rights and against
xenophobia and racism, has gone hand in hand with attempts on the part of
Jewish ex-radicals to rethink their own Jewish specificity and their relationship
as Jews to other minorities.22 This increased Jewish self-identification on the
part of erstwhile Jewish radicals must also be seen against the backdrop of an
increasingly anti-semitic French cultural and political Left. Situating the scene
in this broader context shows how it participates in an inter-generational
dialogue among left-minded French Jews about the cultural and socio-political
meaning(s) of their Jewishness. In this comic and somewhat unsettling
encounter between an old man talking about God, shit and deportation, and
young toughs talking about killing ‘keufs’, La Haine grapples with its relationship vis-à-vis Jewish history by posing the question ostentatiously if obliquely
of its own relation (or possible lack thereof) to mid-twentieth-century Jewish
persecution and political struggle.
Just before he emerges from the stall to tell his strange tale, the old man presumably hears Hubert’s attempt to convince Vinz of the misguidedness of
murdering a police officer with the argument that ‘s’il y a un truc que
l’histoire nous a appris, c’est que la haine attire la haine’ (p. 114). While
Vinz emphatically rejects Hubert’s appeal to history with a typically exaggerated claim to belong to the street — ‘Moi je vis dans la rue . . .’ (p. 114) — the
old man’s tale of Grunwalski returns to a historical perspective more insistently. As several critics have noted, the man’s tale of Jewish persecution at
the hands of both Hitler (he survived Dachau) and Stalin (he was sent to
Siberia) raises questions about the relationship between social violence in
1990s France and extreme forms of structural violence such as the genocidal
and totalitarian projects of Hitler and Stalin.23 On a related but less obvious
level, the scene also asks whether or not the (Jewish) cultural politics of the
1968 generation (that of Mathieu Kassovitz’s parents) transmit to Kassovitz’s
own generation of Jewish artists.
As Judith Friedlander discusses at length in her 1990 study of Jewish intellectuals in France since 1968, Vilna on the Seine, many Jews on the French Left
in the late 1960s and 1970s became disillusioned with Left politics that increasingly vilified them, while remaining manifestly unreconciled to the Jewish
establishment. The uneasy relationship many French Jews have had with the
French Left since the late 1960s stems in part from the way certain strains
within the post-revolutionary Left have effectively filled the void left by the
collapse of ‘the revolution’ as a viable project with the spectre of
488
SVEN-ERIK ROSE
‘Israéliens-sionistes-Juifs’ as a highly versatile ideological adversary.
Pierre-André Taguieff goes so far as to see in French society a virulent
‘nouvelle judéophobie’:
In response to the general collapse of the revolutionary Left, the rise of identity
politics, and the turn by certain voices on the Left to anti-Zionist/
anti-semitic/anti-Jewish ideologies, many different Jewish groups — sometimes
in collaboration and sometimes in competition with each other — looked to
the secular Jewish past for cultural and political models. This tendency
began as early as 1967 with the founding of Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, a
group of secular Jewish intellectuals who named themselves after the politically radical cousin — he was executed in 1871 for his support of the Paris
Commune — of the more famous Adolphe Crémieux, founder of the
Alliance Israélite Universelle. Led by its foremost theoretician Richard Marienstras, the group looked especially to the politics of the Bund in interwar Poland
as a model for minority nationalism in a newly conceived multi-national
French state.25 The Cercle Gaston Crémieux preceded May 1968 (the events
of which temporarily interrupted its activities). The tendency among
left-leaning Jews to explore forms of minority nationalism and identity
politics increased significantly, however, as part of the broader shift in the
post-1968 French political scene, which saw in the course of the 1970s antiracism and minority rights replace Marxism as the unifying theme among intellectuals of the Left.
As Auron notes, disillusionment with the French Communist Party in particular, and with gauchiste universalism more generally, seems to have paved the
way for a ‘return’ to Jewishness. A newfound interest in past Jewish revolutionaries became a key component in what Auron describes as the transformation of many ‘Jewish radicals’ into ‘radical Jews’:
Le fort intéret, empreint de nostalgie, pour ces personnages fait partie du processus de transition
de ‘radicaux juifs’ en ‘juifs radicaux’. Le lien différent, profond, et significatif, aux ‘héros de la
24
La Nouvelle Jude´ophobie (Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002), p. 20. On the construction by certain members of
the Left of Israel and Zionism as a re-baptised version of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, see also Alain
Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, chapter 8, and also the footnote on p. 101 (an addition to the original
edition published in 1983).
25
See Marienstras’s important book Être un peuple en diaspora (Paris, Maspero, 1975), in particular ‘Les Juifs
de la diaspora, ou la vocation minoritaire’, pp. 61– 98 (this essay originally appeared in Les Temps modernes, 29
(août-septembre 1973), 455 – 91).
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Les plus récentes métamorphoses de la judéophobie répondent avec une efficacité symbolique
remarquable à la demande de sens et de causes mobilisatrices de tous ceux qui, orphelins de la
‘Révolution’, continuent de penser et de s’orienter dans l’élément du mythe révolutionnaire
de tradition communiste, considéré dans ses multiples variantes, marxiste (versions léniniste,
trotskiste, tier-mondiste) ou anarchiste (néo-gauchisme, ‘nouvelles radicalités’). Pour ces
milieux ‘radicaux’, comme pour tous les groupes d’extrême droite (ce qui n’était pas le cas
jusqu’à la fin des années 1960), Israël incarne le diable, le ‘sionisme’ représente l’ennemi
absolu, et, derrière ces figures visibles et ces dénonciations dicibles, les Juifs sont perçus
comme des êtres inquiétants, malfaisants, redoutables.24
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
489
Seconde Guerre mondiale’ ne peut être uniquement imputable au changement de relations avec
le PC. Il est également lié à la manière dont beaucoup de jeunes juifs, qui avaient épousé
l’extrême gauche à la fin des années 60 et principalement dans les années 70, prirent
conscience de leur identité juive.26
Zalcman’s memoirs . . . justified the decision made by many student activists to abandon the
extreme left and to join Jewish-identified groups. By the time the book was published, Jews
of the generation of 1968 had already formed several different factions among themselves, and
they did not agree on a number of issues. But when it came to the question of the Stalinist
purges, they joined forces once again.29
Rosenzweig and his colleagues published a 1977 French translation of
Salzman’s book. In a brief preface,30 they discuss the transmission of Jewish
cultural and political experience after the ravages of the mid-twentieth
century. ‘Nous avons voulu publier’, they write,
l’histoire de Moshé, ouvrier juif et communiste au temps de Staline. La génération des juifs
d’Europe nés en France découvrirait-elle maintenant de qui elle tient? Mais, il ne s’agit pas
pour nous de se replonger dans un quelconque familialisme. Nous savons bien qu’entre eux
et nous quelque chose s’est rompu. Nous avons simplement voulu voir ces récits déborder de
leur lieu d’origine, façon paradoxale peut-étre pour aujourd’hui d’inventer notre ‘yiddishkeit’,
notre juiverie.31
Les Juifs d’extreˆme gauche en mai 68, p. 158.
Rosenzweig’s works include Catalogue pour des juifs de maintenant, Recherches, no. 38 (septembre 1979; and
La Jeune France juive: conversations avec des juifs d’aujourd’hui (Paris, Libres-Hallier, 1980).
28
Salzman was born in Poland at the turn of the century. In danger for his involvement in the outlawed
Polish communist party, he moved to Paris in 1929, where he joined the Main d’Œuvre Immigrée (MOI),
the communist organization for immigrant workers. Following his dream of joining the ‘land fun
sotsialer gerekhtikeyt, on shum natsionaler unterdrikung’ (land of social justice, with no trace of national
oppression), Salzman, brimming with enthusiasm, moved to Kiev to work as a tailor, in Un men hot mikh
rehabilitirt (Tel Aviv, Israel Book, 1970; reprinted in Amherst, MA, National Yiddish Book Center Steven
Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library no. 07523, p. 12). During Stalin’s purges he was sent to Siberia for
crimes he did not commit. He did ten years of hard labour and spent another nine in a community on the
periphery of the labour camp. After finally being publicly cleared by a Soviet tribunal in 1956, Salzman
returned to Poland. In the early 1960s he and his wife moved once again to Paris.
29
Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 59,
58. Like so much Yiddish literature, thanks to the National Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital
Yiddish Library, Salzman’s memoir is once again available in Yiddish. It is also available in French and
German translation: Histoire ve´ridique de Moshe´: ouvrier juif et communiste au temps de Staline, trans. by Halina
Edelstein (Paris, Encres-Recherches, 1977), and Als Mosche Kommunist war. Die Lebensgeschichte eines
jüdischen Arbeiters in Polen und in der Sowjetunion unter Stalin, trans. by Halina Edelstein and Helma and
Günther Schwarz (Darmstadt, Darmstädter Blätter, 1982).
30
Signed by Frédéric Dajez, Philippe Gumplowicz, Youval Micenmacher, Isy Morgensztern, and Luc
Rosenzweig.
31
Histoire ve´ridique de Moshe´: ouvrier juif et communiste au temps de Staline, unpaginated.
26
27
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One such group of erstwhile soixante-huitards converged around the journalist
Luc Rosenzweig.27 A key figure for this group — they would eventually put
out the journal Traces (1981 –5) — was Mojshe Salzman, whose tragic tale of
persecution at the hands of Stalin echoes Grunwalski’s tragi-comic story, albeit
in a substantially different idiom.28 Widely read in the French-Yiddish
community, Salzman’s 1970 Yiddish memoir Un men hot mikh rehabilitirt
(And They Rehabilitated Me) came to the attention of the 1968 generation
through Salzman’s nephew Frederic Dajez. According to Judith Friedlander,
490
SVEN-ERIK ROSE
32
It seems worth noting in this context that the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, during which
Palestinian terrorists took hostage and eventually killed a group of Israeli athletes, was a major cause of
the dissolution of ‘La Gauche prolétarienne’ and an important milestone in the transformation Yaı̈r
Auron describes of Jewish radicals into radical Jews; see Les Juifs d’extreˆme gauche en mai 68, pp. 227 – 44.
33
Godard has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and a critic of Israel, and has recently treated
the conflict in Notre musique (2004).
34
See Jean Laloum, Les Juifs dans la banlieue parisienne des anne´es 20 aux anne´es 50: Montreuil, Bagnolet et Vincennes
à l’heure de la ‘solution finale’ (Paris, CNRS Editions, 1998).
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Thus in looking to the Jewish past to orient their political and cultural projects
of the future, this group of erstwhile revolutionaries does not seek a nostalgic
continuation of pre-Holocaust and pre-Stalinist Yiddish culture and politics,
but rather looks to that definitively lost tradition for inspiration for Jewish
self-invention.
The old gentleman’s story ostentatiously interrupts the narrative of La Haine
and juxtaposes the lives of the banlieue trio with the memory of the cataclysmic
events in Jewish history of the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, the film
looks back also to the Jewish members of the generation of 1968 and their
attempts to (re-)invent their yiddishkeit and understand its meanings vis-à-vis
the socio-cultural and political challenges multi-ethnic French society faced.
Myrto Konstantarakos is certainly right to ‘detect a wish to re-establish a
dialogue with the previous generation via [La Haine]’ (170). That Kassovitz
chooses to open this dialogue above all through the enigmatic tale about
Grunwalski, however, renders the inter-generational dialogue (also) about the
ongoing meanings of Jewishness in contemporary French culture and politics.
Mathieu Kassovitz’s father Peter is also a well-known film director and a
militant of 1968. Father and son appear on both sides of the camera.
Mathieu has been visible recently in films including Un he´ros tre`s discret
(1996), Le Fabuleux destin d’Ame´lie Poulain (2001), Amen (2002) and Munich
(2005);32 Peter might be best recognized in the part of a ‘jeune homme’ in
Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962).33 If as Konstantarakos writes,
‘Mathieu admits that his intention was to show his parents, who live in the
fifth arrondissement, on the Left Bank of the capital, that the police can still
kill’ (p. 170), we can understand more fully why in both La Haine and Kassovitz’s 1993 Me´tisse (especially male) Jewishness effectively skips a generation.
There are real and figurative Jewish grandparents (Tadek Lokcinski, who
plays the old man in La Haine also plays Felix’s grandfather in Me´tisse) but
only the most fleeting glimpses of parents. Indeed, Kassovitz underscores
his ambivalence about his father’s cultural position when he casts him as a
soporific university professor in Me´tisse and as the well-meaning yet utterly
out-of-touch bourgeois liberal gallery owner in La Haine. As the angry, misogynist and socially inept trio smash up the gallery on their way out, he
utters a platitude about ‘le malaise de banlieue’. Indeed the placement of
Vinz’s family in the cite´ anachronistically recalls the Jewish residents of such
banlieues as Montreuil-sous-Bois, Bagnolet and Vincennes during the
interwar period,34 while skipping over the generation of Kassovitz’s parents.
KASSOVITZ’S LA HAINE
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MIAMI UNIVERSITY
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Yet this apparent elision of the parents’ generation effectively takes up — and
also (re-) directs to Kassovitz’s parents’ generation — the very sort of
questions about the cultural and political meanings of Jewishness in France
with which many of them had grappled earlier.
The meanings of Kassovitz’s return to the generation of his grandparents
remain deeply ambiguous. In Me´tisse, this generation’s culture appears as a
quaint folkloric interlude, and one could argue that the Grunwalski vignette
in La Haine functions similarly. It essentially presents tragic Jewish history
as a comic histoire juive. Yet the enigmatic urgency of the old man’s tale of
Grunwalski argues against such a reading. If La Haine’s three protagonists
cannot say how the old man’s tale relates to their situation, they — and
Kassovitz — are clearly haunted by the question, one the film leaves
palpably open. Saı̈d asks twice ‘pourquoi il nous a raconté ça?’ immediately
after hearing the story. Hours later, as the three friends are killing time on a
Parisian rooftop, Vinz returns to the Grunwalski parable apropos of
nothing. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il a voulu nous dire, le vieux dans les chiottes, tout à
l’heure?’, he asks Hubert. ‘Je sais pas’, Hubert responds, ‘mais c’était
profond’ (p. 156).