La Haine - Summary

The movie La Haine is a black and white, French film. It is about three men that were surrounded by french gangs and living in a 'ghetto' area based in Paris. They were all from different backgrounds (one was Jewish, the other was an Arab and the final person was a black male). Since it is a ghetto area, they are many police around. One day, a police officer had left his gun somewhere. Then in some many scenes later, the Jewish protagonist had found the gun. In the next couple of scenes, there was a lot of rioting going on and the protagonist, with the gun, used that weapon on the police who were also at the riots and were trying to stop it from happening. At one scene the Jewish character, Vinz, started arguing with a policeman where he then started to insult him. after that scene, he then met that same policeman at where they went to after and that same police man would start to threaten him with a gun. This led to the policeman accidentally pulling the trigger of the gun with led to targeting and killing on of the main protagonist (the Jewish character).

The mise  en scene, throughout this film, was all to do with gang violence. Therefore, there were many different things that was related to gang violence, e.g. guns, bandannas and rioting. The fact that there was a gang, instantly brought to the audience attention that the setting of the movie is going to be really rough and the atmosphere would either be quiet or even dangerous because people in the movie wouldn't know where sense of danger would be coming from.

Throughout the whole movie, many panning movements were used when all the different gangs were running through the riots. This specific camera movement was powerful to the audience because it made them feel like they were in the movie with them and they were following the gang to where they would target next in the riots. Also, a lot of shot/reverse shot was used between the three main protagonists when they would be having their conversations.

However, this movie is very stereotypical because of the fact that even if someone was wearing a specific item of clothing that a gang member would wear, the police would instantly target those people even if they were innocent.