Watching the musical “La Haine” is a bit like looking at a beloved’s face under water: It’s familiar, but distorted.
Almost three decades after Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic film became a political sensation and cult hit in France, the actor and director has transformed it into a stage show that opens at the Seine Musicale in Paris on Oct. 10 before touring the country.
The musical tells the same haunting story of three close friends from Paris’s neglected suburban projects who, in the aftermath of a lethal confrontation with the police, go on a rambling journey into the capital with a gun and a thirst for vengeance.
The same young men take center stage — the angry white character of Vinz, originally played by Vincent Cassel; the wise Black boxer Hubert; and the joker Saïd, of North-African descent — and repeat many of the movie’s lines, which became classics in French culture. A clock counts down the same way throughout, rushing toward the same terrible end.
The most significant differences, of course, are the song and dance numbers, produced by some of the biggest names in French music, including the rapper Youssoupha and the pop star Matthieu Chedid, who goes by M. Although the film was saturated with hip-hop culture, it featured very little actual music. The soundtrack was urban percussion — roaring motorcycles and hissing trains.
“I’m very curious to see how people react to it, because it’s close enough to the original movie so that people can feel comfortable. And far enough so people don’t feel betrayed,” Kassovitz, now 57, said in an interview during a rehearsal break, two weeks before opening night. “I’m dancing on a thin line.”
It’s hard to overstate the effect “La Haine” had on French society when it was released in 1995. It was a box office sensation, selling more than 2 million tickets in the first year and winning three César awards — France’s equivalent to the Oscars — including one for best film. Kassovitz was just 28 at the time.
The filmography was arresting, with long fluid shots, mirrors used to collapse or distort space, and most importantly, a lack of color — it was in black-and-white. And it told a story of police brutality from the vantage point of marginalized youth in the forgotten suburbs: a perspective not widely seen in mainstream cinema before.
“Everybody was talking about it,” said Ginette Vincendeau, a professor of film studies at King’s College London, who wrote a book about the movie. “It captured a social problem in an exciting cinematic form, which not many people can do.”
It also struck a nerve among the power class in Paris. President Jacques Chirac sent a letter of thanks to Kassovitz, and Prime Minister Alain Juppé demanded a special screening for government officials, Vincendeau noted.
For many young people in the low-income suburbs, which are known as banlieues in French, it was the first well-financed film in which they could recognize themselves — their hip-hop culture, their slang and their experiences of being oppressed, rather than protected, by the police.
“We compared it a lot to American films, in terms of quality. That’s what also made us banlieusards proud,” said Aurélie Cardin, the creator of the Cinébanlieue Festival, which celebrates the films of young directors from the banlieues. “La Haine” had revealed a hunger for those stories, she said, and inspired many from the suburbs to become filmmakers.
At points, the film’s success became a burden to Kassovitz. His subsequent films could never measure up. He mused publicly about making a sequel, but never did, he said, as it would only depict violence.
Then, a few years ago, he got a call from the producer Farid Benlagha Le Hazif, suggesting they make a musical. Kassovitz hates musical theater, but he loves a challenge.
He dissected his film, looking for small, seemingly gratuitous moments holding deeper untapped significance that could be explained with songs. “There is no scene in ‘La Haine’ that is there for free,” he said. “That’s why the movie is ageless. There are messages in everything.” After just one night working, he came up with 15 such moments.
Kassovitz said yes, and the stage director Serge Denoncourt soon joined as his co-director.
Days after the project was announced last year, 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was killed by police in a traffic stop near his home in the suburbs north of Paris, and France erupted in riots.
“Unfortunately, we’re still relevant,” Kassovitz said. He altered the famous refrain that bookends the film, repeated by a man falling from a building — a metaphor for society crashing: “So far, so good. The important part is not the fall. It’s the landing.” Instead, the posters for the musical, read: “So far, nothing has changed.”
The sense that things remained depressingly similar also struck Philippe Fragione, a well-known French rapper who goes by the stage name Akhenaton, when he rewatched the movie in order to write a song for the musical.
“The cops. The skin heads. High society people. Everything is exactly the same. And the state of the projects — totally the same,” he said. Stuck also, he said, was the hatred — of the young men in the neglected suburbs for the ruling class that, in turn, hates them back. He wrote a rap in the voice of the character Vinz, who is accidentally murdered by a police officer at the end of the film. In Akhenaton’s song, Vinz is 50, talking with wisdom to his younger angry self, and telling him to not marinate in hate.
“Vinz, listen closely to me, I am the person you could be. The Vinz in 30 years standing under calm skies. But all that’s not possible unless you raise your head,” the song begins.
Nostalgia features prominently in the musical, and Kassovitz expects most people in the audience will know the film well. So he plays with that cult status.
This is also true of the set design. Members of the video design crew went back to the poor neighborhood where much of the film was shot 30 years ago to scan key buildings, murals and landmarks and use them for the musical’s three-dimentional digital backdrop. They also added some new elements that the show’s lead set and video designer, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, called “Easter eggs” for die-hard fans to spot.
In one case, there is a billboard with a poster advertising the film, using a working title from before it became “La Haine.” In another, the three friends walk by a storefront called Galerie Brownstone, which is where one scene in the film was shot.
“It’s an inside joke, for me, as well, because I love the movie. I’ve watched it so many times now,” Coutu-Dumont said.
The musical couldn’t possibly have the same political and societal impact as the film, Kassovitz said. Decades later, the subject of fatal police errors in poor neighborhoods has become well-trodden territory in France. Well-known artists have emerged from the neighborhoods to tell their own stories — there is no need for intermediaries like him to humanize them, Kassovitz added.
He also doesn’t expect his musical to open minds. Instead, he hopes it reminds its viewers of the things they thought and felt when they first saw the film — about injustice and love for others, instead of hate.
“Remember why you fought,” Kassovitz said. “Remember that you have that in you — it’s still there.”
“The last word of the show,” he added, “is ‘love.’”
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