Blu-ray: May 8, 2012
Price: Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
Vincent Cassel aims to be heard in La haine.
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (The Crimson Rivers), the 1995 French drama La Haine (Hate) is a gritty and unsettling film that looks at racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income outskirts of Paris.
Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1), Hubert (Hubert Koundé, The Constant Gardener) and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui, Three Kings) — white, black and Arab — give human faces to France’s immigrant and otherwise marginalized populations, their resentment at their situation simmering until it reaches a boiling point.
Shot in silvery black-and-white, the hard-hitting La Haine is tough stuff that reflects its country of origin’s ongoing identity crisis.
A work of tough beauty, the movie is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
A popular film on the festival circuit that won filmmaker Kassovitz a Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, La Haine was issued on DVD
The Blu-ray edition features a restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Mathieu Kassovitz, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. It also has includes the following bonus features, most of which were ported over from the DVD:
- English-language audio commentary by Kassovitz
- introduction by actor Jodie Foster
- Ten Years of “La Haine,” an 80-minute documentary that brings together cast and crew a decade after the film’s landmark release
- featurette on the film’s banlieue setting, including interviews with sociologists Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jeffrey Fagan, and William Kornblum
- production footage
- deleted and extended scenes, each featuring an afterword by Kassovitz
- gallery of behind-the-scenes photos
- trailers
- booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and a 2006 appreciation by acclaimed filmmaker Costa-Gavras
|
Buy or Rent La Haine
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|
  Blu-ray  |
 Blu-ray |
 Blu-ray |
 |
Leave a Reply