La Haine/Funny Games

LA HAINE (Hate) – Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995

The Eiffel Tower. L’Arc de Triomphe. The Champs-Élysées. All tourist attractions, and what most people think of when they remember Paris. But in La Haine, director Mathieu Kassovitz’ full-length debut, we get a roundhouse kick to the face to jar us out of our chocolate box views of capital city life.

The film dunks us headfirst into the strange brew formed by France’s colonial legacy, focusing on three young men; cocky Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), hate-filled Vinz (Vincent Cassel) and desperate Hubert (Hubert Koundé). All three live in the same suburban housing project, away from the tourists, and constantly targeted by riot police. A teen from the area is in a coma following an earlier riot, and Vinz, who found a gun in the riot, vows to kill a copper if his friend dies.

What follows is a fateful day in the lives of France’s underclass, a real journey into the black hearts of a white country. The trio travel between the suburbs and the city, between the tourist Paris and its forgotten underworld. The three teens are all Parisian natives, but they belong nowhere. They are taunted by the slogan, swiped from Scarface, ‘The World Is Yours.’ In truth, they own nothing but the clothes on their back.

On its release, La Haine shook France up. No-one had realised the extent of the anger and violence that went on under their very noses. It hadn’t occurred to most white French people that the police were institutionally racist towards the country’s immigrant population. The problems were always there; La Haine just gave them a voice.

Kassovitz’ direction goes for the jugular from the off, cutting economically and manically between scenes. La Haine is more a series of vignettes set around the aftermath of violence. The dialogue used, a mixture of gangster words and the snappy French slang known as ‘verlan,’ is razor-sharp, as you would expect from a director who is clearly close to his subject. But it’s less about what the characters say, and more what the piece as a whole says, and La Haine is the cinematic equivalent of being gobbed at in the face by a handcuffed teenage suspect. Mesmerising.

FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 1997)

How far would you go to survive being killed by a pair of lunatics? You’d probably do whatever they ask, right? Well, in Funny Games, that wouldn’t count for an awful lot. Austrian director Michael Haneke brings a twisted sense of comedy to this most nightmarish of situations.

A well-off family take a trip out to their plush holiday home on the lake to relax. Their lives take a strange turn when a young man called Peter (Frank Giering) turns up to ask for some eggs, and invites himself and his friend Paul (Arno Frisch) into the family’s home. Within a few hours they are holding the family hostage, keen to play some very macabre games indeed.

The beauty of Funny Games is not that it’s particularly strange or violent, although it is undoubtedly both, but rather that Haneke insists on psychologically torturing his audience along with his victims. Peter and Paul, his psychopathic invaders, are by turns charismatic and funny, and we are torn between willing their captives to escape and seeing what the torturers are going to come up with next. This is not your average thriller.

Of course, this is merely what Haneke wants. The point of Funny Games is that it plays on our natural lust for violence and thrills. We watch cop shows and video nasties; we see a million sick images and still want to be part of the audience. Peter and Paul give us what we want to see – ready-made suffering. Every now and again, the handsome Paul will break the fourth wall and address the audience, referring to the tricks of this kind of film.

Because this is not your average slasher flick, it doesn’t lead to a happy ending but that’s not Haneke’s point. He’s done exactly what he set out to achieve, ramping up the tension and satisfying our violent tendencies before puncturing our bubble with major doses of reality. In essence, we make up the story in our own minds through what we’ve already seen, and where Funny Games is different is that it brings us back down to Earth with a major, bone-shattering bump.