La Haine, and the first season of The Wire make up the whole of this short post. It's pure coincidence that this post has a sociopolitical theme in which the crummy lives of the poor and how the police respond to that are examined. One is set in France and the other in Baltimore, USA. Two entirely unique locales, but both reveal that the lower classes and minority races are very marginalized in society. Both La Haine and The Wire reveal a bit about the other. La Haine is helped by The Wire because the side of the police is not addressed with as much importance as it is in The Wire, and so it helps to understand the police and the problems they have themselves. The Wire is aided by La Haine in the sense that it gives the The Wire a more international perspective instead of the show being purely about America. La Haine shows that the problems of urban life in Baltimore displayed in The Wire are not just exclusive to America. Anyways, both of these are pretty important and I highly recommend both.
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, France, 1995): When it comes to political or sociopolitical films like La Haine, the most common flaw is that they oversimplify complex problems for the sake of a coherent narrative film that has to be about two hours long. As a person with an interest in politics and films, it's a disappointing fact but one I understand because of how difficult it would be to really accurately capture complex realities in such a short time (as you'll see below, it is possible, for David Simon at least, to capture reality in all its complexities in television). La Haine is a movie that does attempt to look at issues like immigration, police brutality, and minority/lower class life in the ghettos of France in general. This whole situation is very complex, and to my surprise La Haine succeeded fairly well in telling a story that rings true, at least compared to other movies. The story centers on three young men living in the ghettos of France, one is Jewish, one is black, and the other is Arab. One of them finds a gun, something the police have a lot of and is also a symbol of empowerment, and threatens to kill a police officer if a friend of theirs who was injured by police in riots dies.
The empowering symbolized by the gun brings up the question of what responsibility the police have considering they are always empowered with guns. Having a gun means you have a responsibility, and how you handle that responsibility is what this movie is about. Vincent Cassel's character says that he wants to kill a police officer with that gun, and the movie ends up being a film with a message against revenge and any type of hatred. La Haine is a film about the pointlessness of hate, but it shines a light on where the hate comes from on the side of the immigrants and lower classes. There are many scenes in the film in which the characters aren't really doing anything at all, they have no jobs so their lives are pointless. They are young, rebellious, and have time, so they take their anger out at the police and the government sometimes very forcefully. The young people of the French ghettos are marginalized in society, and it's not easy for them to fit in like the elites want them to.
One of the questionable aspects of the movie is the suggestion that the struggle is class-based and not race-based. The main characters are different races, but the film never makes that important, when in reality race is certainly an issue. The filmmaking itself externalizes the energy of the characters, filled with fast editing, some meticulously composed shots, and even cutaways to dreams or hallucinations. The style is very American and inspired by Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee especially. Sometimes the style is maybe a bit too American, but most of the time the movie is riveting and incredibly compelling. La Haine does not take on every complexity of the situation in France, but I didn't expect it to do that. What it succeeds at is creating riveting characters that live in a home that is not very inviting, and displaying how their response to that environment must be cautious, or that environment could get even worse.
Grade: A-
The Wire: Season One (David Simon, USA, 2002): In the above post on La Haine I mentioned the difficulties many movies have in capturing all the sociopolitical complexities of real life. This may be because of the shorter running time offered to films, so you'd think that television has a better opportunity to truly capture reality. Despite this, The Wire is the only TV show I've seen that has taken full advantage of the medium and takes a novelistic approach to better handle the sociopolitical realities of the world. Our world is a complex place in which you'll be hard-pressed to find heroes and villains, and The Wire reflects that completely. The first season of the show focuses on the drug trade, and it shows this by focusing on a group of police officers and their season-long investigation of a very successful drug gang. The show is slow in the beginning as it sets everything up, but by the time all the back and forth between the police and the drug dealers comes to an end, you realize the pacing was great because if it was faster it wouldn't be accurate. All the accuracy and realism shows us that both the police and the dealers are all part of a game.
On both sides, the objective of the game is to get ahead of the rest of the pack at all costs. For the police, it's getting rank, and to get rank you have to good clean numbers. If a murder from a previous year falls to you and it doesn't affect your clearance rate for this year, then there's no reason to work on it because it won't help you win the game. If going on drug raids to get drug charges on people who you know have committed murders and are involved in corruption is what you have to do to get ahead, then that's what you do. On The Wire there are cops on the show that have good in their heart, who want to do the right thing, but that police bureaucracy always gets in their way. I don't think David Simon intended for this show to break police procedural cliche's for the sake of being unconventional, because I think he intended to make a show that reflected real life, but despite that he breaks many film and television cliche's of police officers. On the other end, we get a whole new perspective on drug dealers. For them they want to get ahead by getting the most money and success. But for most of these guys, drug dealing is the environment they grew up in and the only opportunity they have. For people like D'Angelo Barksdale, it's all about family, and he can't get out of the family operation even if he wants to.
It's hard to root for anyone on this show, and because of that I guess it's kind of depressing. But I don't see it that way, I see it as a show that adds to my knowledge of how the real world works. The Wire is a show that turns the American Dream into the American Tragedy. We can't solve these problems until we know what these problems are. I've seen a lot of shows and movies about how power corrupts, but this one brings that home by actually showing us our home and real examples of how the world around us is a big game without the necessarily rules. The War on Drugs and criminal justice system is basically a football game in which everyone wants to get a touchdown, but they can do whatever they need to do. Because in this football game there are no unnecessary roughness penalties, no false start penalties, and no pass interference penalties. When it comes to sociopolitical issues in film and TV, I don't know if I've ever seen it done better than The Wire.
Grade: A
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