When Kassovitz's La haine movie was introduced in France, it caused something of a stir because of numerous motivations. One of these was surely that the movie discusses the banlieues (suburbs) subject, which represents unemployment, social exclusion, racial conflict, urban decadence, criminality and violence. Another motivation was probably the negative picture which the police has in the movie, such as being racist and overweight. The last one and maybe the most important was the strong accent which the movie gave to the social and cultural problems in France.

The first scene shows a molotov cocktail, which falls down to the earth, while a voice says: "There was a man who jumped down from the 50th floor. While falling, he was making sure that he's OK. So far I'm OK. So far I'm OK... But the important thing is not falling. It's the landing." The same story was proposed in the movie, but this time there is the society in place of the man

By this beginning declaration, Mathieu Kassovitz announced his intention to realize an analysis on the irreversible collapse of France, of the Western society, maybe of the entire world, destroyed by the hate, taking like a pretext the disorders burst in a suburb of Paris in 1993, after the shooting of a sixteen-years-old Zairean youth called Makomé Bowole in police custody.

The choice of the three protagonists, an Algerian guy, Said, a Jewish, Winz, and a Black, Hubert, who represent three historically persecuted minorities, has the intention to render the provocation more explicit and wants to express the principle, used often by Truffat in his movies, which, affronting an universal subject, it needs to be indirect and tells the detail.

Winz finds a police revolver, which starts the adventures of the protagonists in the description of our twenty-four hours life. Hence the events follow one another without an accurate cause-effect connection, but they accumulate one on the others.

The atmosphere is hot in the suburb and the three protagonists, worried for the life of their friend in coma, build up their personal and, in the same time, mass fight against the police which is the first symbol of the social order and the institutional power.

The absurdity of the violence finds, also with the choice to use black and white to not make a spectacular film, a reason in the guys' life: the violence, whether not explicit, becomes palpable, is on the explosion point from a moment to other one. Kassovitz describes a situation in which the violence seems inevitable, overall in the fight scenes between the youth and the police and between the protagonists and a skinhead group.

In a ideological view, Kassovitz, who draws one's inspiration from movie like Coppola's RumbleFish, wants to show that the only subversive propellant, which exists in the Western world, is the explosive potentiality of the ideological-free and sub proletarian mass of the metropolitan suburbs.

Differently from the Pasolini's ideological cinema, which showed the life condition and the psychological attitude of Rome's degraded outskirts, La haine is without a really revolutionary conscience. For this lack we can agree with Dahrendorf, who sees no structural forms in the irrational and disorganized nature of the marginal mass, so the violence propellent never builds up forms of expression. In other words, there is no longer a functional equivalent to socialism, because the capitalist system can do without the productive contribution of such classes and be not afraid the destabilization and opposing powers. In the same way the movie presents to us the fragmented and varied marginality, less of a reference to a united and uniting explanation and of a common enemy.

There is also an age conflict, in which the three young friends are opposite to grownups, who, when there are, look to belong to another world and set up a menacing attendance to avoid, or sometimes represent impotence and doubt, like in the view of the missing familiar structure.

Other fundamental characteristic are represented in the movie from the "verlan" (a typical slang which the Parisienne suburbs people speak), from American and French rap and Bob Marley's songs, from the representation of a multiethnic mass, from the police behavior, from the indiscriminate use of the drugs, all symbols which fall behind the images, which are the context for real life and only in some moments express the metropolitan discomfort of the post industrial society.

La Haine movie shows a life which flows out of Paris and out of the weal; the suburbs inhabitants, overall young, rebel and turn down the roles enforced from the external side: from little struggles with the police often arise real warfares, organized rebellion, which lines through the violence the border between who live in the banlieues and who do not, between a Paris, lived like a dream or a kind of earth's paradise from which the protagonists inexorably are thrown out, and the bad and totally abandoned suburbs. So, Kassovitz ironically in a scene shows us quickly on the road a poster which sings the praises of globalization.

The relationship between the young friends and the culture and the media is nonexistent, but it seems almost useless in that kind of society. The scene of the discussion between the television troupe and the protagonists shows how the media spectacolarization sometimes uses the suburbs life for its trash news. In the same way, the scene, in which the three guys are in the art gallery, is a clear example that the culture and the tradition can not change the life of the banlieues, almost to recall the fight between post modernism and modernism or between high culture and mass culture.

About the way of playing, Kassovitz uses the endearing techniques: the use of black and white, for example, is a clear demonstration that he make an aesthetic rather than an functional cinema, or the use of extreme foreground gives more "empatia" and annoyance to the viewers.

Finally, in the movie there are many quotes from famous films, that is connected with the pastiche concept typical of the postmodern cinema: the initial scene presents to us three protagonists like in the Sergio Leone's movie Il buono, il brutto ed il cattivo, or when Winz in front of the bathroom mirror interprets again Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.