We’re still falling, but maybe we’re just getting closer to the ground.
So, you heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? At every floor he passed, he kept saying to himself: So far so good, so far so good... But it’s not how you fall that matters. It’s how you land”.
● Writing
With this parable, La Haine (1995) sets the tone for what is less a narrative than a slow-motion freefall—of individuals, institutions, and ideals. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, the film doesn’t simply portray life in the banlieue; it constructs a world in which gravity is not just physical but social, architectural, and historical. It follows three protagonists with, respectively, African, Arab, and Jewish backgrounds—Hubert, Saïd, and Vinz. Accompanied by the ticking of a clock that sounds more like the pulse of a bomb, we follow them over the course of 24 hours, from the aftermath of a riot to a final act of violence.
La Haine is widely recognized as a landmark film that places the issue of the housing estate—la cité—at the heart of cinematic inquiry. By unlocking the visual and narrative potential of the banlieues, Kassovitz portrays the lived realities of its residents and reveals the devastating consequences of systemic violence, spatial alienation, and postcolonial fragmentation. Yet Kassovitz himself did not grow up in these spaces. His gaze—sharpened, sensitive, but inevitably external—raises the question: Can one film the margins without reproducing the distances that define them?
The choice of filming location is not incidental. The central setting—La Noé, located in Chanteloup-les-Vignes in the northwestern suburbs of Paris—is a textbook example of a factory-built housing estate. Originally constructed to accommodate workers from the Simca-Chrysler automotive plant, the estate was designed by architect Émile Aillaud between 1966 and 1984. His architectural vision sought to humanize poverty with abstract forms, curved towers, serpentine facades, and vibrant public spaces. But these dreams curdled. The built environment, once imagined as a zone for community and creativity, becomes in La Haine a labyrinth of stagnation, tension, and surveillance.
At ground level, instead of the planned diversity of uses, the architecture produces a sense of suffocation and paranoia. Playgrounds, hills, abstract sculptures, and ornamental structures—originally intended as leisure spaces and, in Aillaud’s words, as “zones for dreaming”—appear instead as non-places, stripped of identity and resonance. They fail to offer the protagonists any sense of belonging. This critique of scenographic excess is underscored by a surreal moment in which Vinz glimpses a cow wandering through the estate—a creature seemingly lost in a built environment that long ago replaced the region’s original vineyards.
And yet, architecture alone does not bear the burden of failure. The estate becomes oppressive not simply through its form, but through the political and economic systems that shaped its use, its neglect, and its media portrayal. What La Haine ultimately exposes is not just the failure of modernist design, but the way in which urban space is weaponized by a broader apparatus of control—where policy, policing, and public discourse converge to render entire communities invisible, criminalized, or disposable.
The compressed layout of the blocks creates narrow, shadowy corridors, and pedestrian movement is tightly dictated by planning decisions. Aillaud once said that “a city is made for wandering,” but in La Noé, the architecture produces spaces of boredom and entrapment. The characters move not by choice but by lack of alternatives, endlessly circling the same dead ends. And yet, even within this concrete maze, they unconsciously adopt a kind of détournement—repurposing paths and spaces in ways that suit their needs. In doing so, they resist the imposed logic of the environment and reclaim fragments of spatial agency, however fleeting.
The cité is not a backdrop—it is a character. It absorbs its inhabitants, dictating how they move, interact, and resist. Wide-angle shots root the protagonists in space; close-ups tighten around their faces, pressing against invisible walls. The estate curves and folds inward, swallowing light and sky. One of the few truly open spaces is the rooftop—temporarily beyond the reach of police patrols and architectural surveillance. But even this suspended autonomy is short-lived. As in so many postmodern dystopias, control eventually finds its way upward.
And yet, the film does not simply document this spatial collapse. It aestheticizes it—with stunning visual precision. Shot in stark black-and-white, La Haine turns the brutalist landscape into a kind of ruin from the future. There’s a strange beauty in its desolation, and that beauty is not innocent. Kassovitz’s camera doesn’t just witness; it composes, stylizes, elevates. The result is both moving and unsettling.
Perhaps the real question is not whether the film aestheticizes pain, but how it does so—and for whom. La Haine renders the architecture of marginalization with a visual grandeur typically reserved for epics or elegies. The banlieue is not just filmed; it is monumentalized. The chiaroscuro lighting, the compositional precision, the fluidity of movement through space—all of this constructs a viewing experience that borders on the sublime.
This tension mirrors the very condition of the cité: designed to dignify, it ends up dehumanizing. Similarly, Kassovitz’s visual language tries to dignify the experiences of the marginalized, yet inevitably aestheticizes their suffering. The film becomes a kind of double mirror: reflecting the violence of the system while implicating itself in the spectacle it constructs.
In this way, La Haine invites the viewer into a deeply uncomfortable position—not only to empathize, but to reflect on their own desire to watch. There is power in this unease. Kassovitz doesn't resolve it—he holds it open. And in doing so, the film becomes a critique not only of the structures it depicts, but also of the medium through which those structures are seen. It challenges not only the state’s claim to control space, but cinema’s claim to represent it.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the closing sequence, which unfolds beneath mosaic portraits of Rimbaud and Baudelaire—rebels turned icons, whose words once challenged bourgeois morality. These figures appear as ornamental gatekeepers of a culture that aestheticizes resistance while neutralizing it. Aillaud dreamed of using art to spark belonging. In La Haine, these images stare down at the protagonists like relics of a world that never included them.
The police, too, are not external—they are embedded in the very architecture. Their presence is not just felt but built into the rhythms of daily life. In one scene, local youth gather in a ruined gym and surround themselves with police tape, mimicking the mechanisms used to cordon them off. It’s a moment of dark satire and spatial irony: in a world where public space is always provisional, even self-gathering becomes an act of policing.
Kassovitz’s gaze—unlike that of Ladj Ly in Les Misérables (2019), who films from within the banlieue he knows—operates from a threshold: inside enough to care, outside enough to look. Both directors explore the carceral logic of the banlieue and the moral ambiguities of revolt. But while Ly implicates the viewer directly in the violence, Kassovitz offers a space of contemplation—perhaps too contemplative.
The phrase “L’avenir, c’est nous” (“We are the future”), scrawled above Hubert’s head, might seem to offer hope. But in this world of systemic loops and closed circuits, the line feels less like prophecy and more like a bitter joke.
Hubert’s voice returns at the end—“So far so good…”—a mantra of denial in the face of inevitable impact. The characters aren’t suspended in descent; they are already close to the ground. And perhaps so are we, watching—wondering not how they fell, but from what height we chose to see it.