La Haine

Watching the film La Haine (1995). Oh dear, tough guys are talking about killing cops in a public bath room when a short man emerges from the stall and starts telling a story about a group of men on a train trip to Siberia and how one of them froze to death because he was too ashamed to shit on the tracks like everybody else, and instead went to the bushes and was unable to catch the train when it left, because every time he would try to reach the hand of the story teller, he would have to retract it to pull up his pants falling to his ankles. That look on the guys faces after hearing the story. The scene as everybody leaves the bathroom, and then one more guy emerges from yet another stall. Haha, so deep.

Maybe they’ll shoot the cow.

Finished it, pretty good. As with all modern black and white films, I was not quite sure what was the artistic value of doing it in grayscale. I guess the old colors made me think how the present is the same as the past. There was senseless violence before, and there still is. In a way it doesn’t greatly matter in which time the film takes place. Certainly this is not what the creators intended me to think by making the film black and white, but I suppose it is possible they thought it would on average make audience think of something and then like the film better for it. Maybe a lot of art is like that — you can be ambigious and let the audience do part of the work. If it increases their enjoyment, then surely you did the right thing.

It’s great how the film ends referring to the joke told early in the film: “A man falls from a skyscraper, and looking at each floor as he passes them he thinks, ‘everything good so far’”. It’s not the falling but the landing that’s tough. And that’s how the film went too. The group is “falling” with their risky behavior, but they manage it and everything seems good. But in the end the ground hits them mercilessly. That’s pretty much the most true answer to why crime isn’t worth it, but it’s almost so obvious that rarely does a film try to portray it as straightforwadly as this one did. Usually films will instead revolve around a spiral of increasing criminal behavior or an eventual karmic retribution, probably because those work nicely as stories. Reality however is more like in the film — you survive a group of skinheads coming at you with knives and bats, but then a dumb police guy shoots you by accident because earlier the day you pissed him off.