I put off watching this film for at least a decade because the synopsis always made it sound really grim.
You can make a film about an explosive, violent and hard-hitting reality without using a heavy hand or becoming preachy. It’s a combination of the subject matter (sadly, still relevant today), the performances (uninhibited and visceral), and the visual styling (ambitious, impressive and giving no sign of being limited by technology available in the mid-Nineties). Sounds kind of obvious, but it’s worth trying to figure out why this film, now 20 years old, feels like it could have been made yesterday. Do it right and your film will never feel dated. Oh, and he was only 27 years old when he made the film. A good example – the way the name ‘Hubert’ lights up on the poster in the boxing room just before we meet Cousin Hubert for the first time. His touch with them is so light that you notice, if you’re into that kind of stuff, but it never takes you out of the story. 
Director Mathieu Kassovitz’s filmmaking is confident and accomplished.Įven for a set-in-gritty-reality film like this, he finds moments for special effects. 
Such an almost stream-of-consciousness approach is very easy to get wrong but in the able hands of the three leads it makes us believe that we are part of events as they unfold. Saïd Taghmaoui’s wide eyed enthusiasm, Vincent Cassel’s coiled intensity or Hubert Koundé’s quiet watchfulness – we are with the three leads throughout the film, essentially just watching them go about their day. That is not to say there is no music at all – it’s just that it is diegetic. It didn’t make a bit of difference to the experience, in fact it might have made it more impactful. I didn’t realise until almost halfway into the film that there was no background score.
You can make a perfectly fabulous and impactful film with little or no music in it. 
20 years after it first released and became a phenomenon, we finally watched French director Mathieu Kassovitz’s award-winning film La Haine.
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