Episode 739: La Haine (1995)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M oh g is folks, it's showtime.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
People say good money to see this movie.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater, they are cold sodas,
pop popcorn and no monsters.

Speaker 4 (00:16):
In the protection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 5 (00:20):
Done at all?

Speaker 6 (00:39):
Said he's to had an empty tom Then remember the
second the macro fun Street. It's apt Sancess Juicy, see
Tobya Jusky, See to babya Husky, see to babya in
a port palace street Sea Terry sash you.

Speaker 7 (01:26):
Yeah, Hello, didn't know.

Speaker 5 (01:37):
What Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White,
join me once again. Is miss Judith.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Maine, I'm Mike.

Speaker 5 (01:54):
Also back in the booth is Mixed Lou and Tienne.

Speaker 8 (01:57):
Hello, thank you for having me this This week.

Speaker 5 (02:00):
We were looking at Matthew Kissowitz's Laan. Released in nineteen
ninety five, the film tells the story of three youths
from the projects outside of Paris and their struggles to
navigate their world, a world filled with violence, police brutality, drugs, poverty,
and riots. The film takes place over a twenty four
hour period of time and captures a point that is

(02:21):
all too familiar today. We will be swalling this film
as we discussed it, so if you don't anything ruined,
please turn off the podcast and come on back after
you've seen it. We will still be here. Solu. When
was the first time you saw Laan and what did
you think?

Speaker 8 (02:34):
The first time I saw it en was like maybe
twenty ten and I was shown it by a friend
I was so close to. He was like my brother,
and he looked so much like Vincent Kassel in this film,
but luckily he had none of Vince's like idiot, macho swagger.
He was like gentle and loving and generous and sadly
he was also killed really young. Yeah sorry, immediately lower

(02:58):
the tone, but no, but I want. I wanted to
come back to this film because I wanted to think
about him and also to watch it as a full adult.
And my first thought when I watched it for this
episode was like, oh my god, do I have a type?
Because this is a lot like Christallief My Car, the
first film that I spoke to you Mike about on
the projection booth, because they're both these like gorgeous black

(03:20):
and white films that like plunge you into masculinist worlds
of fatalism and chaos and decay, and I realized that
Christaalioff premiered dot com like three years after Latin, so
it'd be a really dark but a really interesting exercise
to sort of program them together and.

Speaker 5 (03:40):
Jub how about yourself?

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Ever since I saw that question in your email, I've
been thinking about when I first saw this film, and
I can't remember. I'm sorry, but I think it was
sometime not too long after it was released. But I
also taught this film in my contemporary friends. Well it's
contemporary then when I was still and I've loved the

(04:02):
film since then. And one of the things I just
watched it yesterday for the first time, probably in twenty
some years, And what really astonished me about the film is,
but you watch it as so have all the power
and impact that it has when you first see it.
But also it's a film that could have been made yesterday.

(04:23):
It's just so relevant, so intense. Now I'm a big
fan of Matya Kassovit's I think he's an amazing actor
and director, and this film, I think is just so extraordinary.
There are things about it that bother me. There are
criticisms you could raise about it, as many people did

(04:44):
when it came out, But I think it's a really amazing,
a really amazing film.

Speaker 5 (04:51):
Yeah, I'm much more familiar with Kessovitz from his acting.
We talked about The Fifth Element a few months ago.
He's got a wonderful tiny role in there as a
mugger who does some great dancing. I much more know
him from his acting than from his directing. Of course,
he was also in Amalae, which is one of my favorites,
and he's great in that as well. I just watched

(05:14):
this for the first time for this episode just because
something about this movie, and I think what it was
is Vinsic Cassal. I think there's something about him just
because he's so angry and abusive and so many of
the roles that he plays. I'm just like, I don't
really want to see this guy do this again. It's
like so unusual when I see him in a role
where he's not being an asshole, like you know, I

(05:37):
think of movies like Irreversible or Black Swan like those
kind of things. But then he's perfectly fine in a
movie like Underwater, And of course, you know, I've seen
him in a bunch of things where I'm just like, oh, yeah, no,
and he's just he's a fucking fantastic actor. And all
three of these leads are wonderful, and I love the

(05:57):
way that this film is put together. I feel pretty
bad that I've avoided it for so long because this
really nineteen ninety five. This would have been my jam
probably in ninety five, and this is I know some
people have made comparisons between this and things like Boys
in the Hood or Menace to Society, and it's like, no,
it's so different, And like you said, so many of
these problems are still here with us today. I mean,

(06:21):
they get interpreted in different ways, like I'm a you
know you talked about and again I apologize for my French,
but is it pronounced ben lews? The neighborhoods, the projects
basically like I'm a huge fan of ben U thirteen,
the science fiction slash Parkore film, which is very similar
to Assault on Precinct thirteen meets Escape from New York,

(06:43):
and it's like, I really like the idea of exploring
these projects, but not as real, I guess because this one, man,
oh man, what a what a wake up call this
must have been for France or at least I would
hope it would have been a wake up call. But really,
when I hear about the riots and the pow and
the things that are still there, I guess it didn't

(07:03):
really shake them to the cores as much as I
wished it had.

Speaker 8 (07:07):
The element of lahin that really prevents it from being
politically viable, from preventing it from really making waves is
its fatalism, And I think this is the most dangerous element.
Like even when Ubert wants to get out, when he
sees the harm and the uselessness of violence, he's inevitably
pulled back into it. Right, You're doomed whether you fire
the shot or not. Neither Vince nor Sai'd have any

(07:28):
real power in the film. You know you're damned if
you do, and you're damned if you don't. The film
is driven by this impending tragedy, with the ticking countdown
and this fall from the skyscraper. We know that our
characters won't survive. Life is sort of unstructured and it's meaningless.
It's this hopeless cycle and it ends badly in the end, right,

(07:50):
And the threat of violence is always is always imminent.
But I think this really naturalizes the site as this violent,
anarchic space, just like biased media Ridge does, fueling fascination
with or fear of its inhabitants. Right, And it's problematic
because Kassovitz clearly wants to incite revolt, he wants to
set people on fire, but he plays right into the

(08:12):
dominant perception of Bandus as powder kegs Right as hot districts,
And I think this film ultimately does very little to
challenge the perception of life in the Bandu as like
this lethal mixture of drugs and unemployment and brutality. And
the difference between Kassovits and the government ministers watching this
film as if it's real reporting is that Kassovitz finds

(08:35):
these images exciting, whereas the people in power use these
same perceptions to kind of justify the institutional violence that
Kassovitz is depicting. It's just like the problem with fatalism.
The problem with narratives that depict death and violence as
inevitable is that fatalism is really numbing, it's really stultifying,

(08:56):
and it makes us feel powerless. I think at best,
this film raises consciousness about certain conditions, but without any
viable solution. Any vision of change consciousness raising films, They
just breed complacency, right these fatalism tells us that these
areas are a lost cause. And then I think that
it only really serves to excuse the failures of governments

(09:19):
to address exclusion and social deprivation in effective ways. And
fatalism can really play into the hands of the far right,
like Lahan could easily promote fear mongering about the inevitability
of violence, about rash, misogynistic youth over there, right, and
the impending crisis if we let them in, right, And so,

(09:40):
I don't know. I find it a really frustrating film
because it's also very beautiful and very effective in other ways.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
The character that's the biggest disappointment, and that respect is
either because here's somebody who's a successful boxer and he's
different from the other two friends in that respect. He
actually has path that he's following, he has a goal.
He's also very much the peacemaker in relationship to the

(10:07):
other two, and he's a wonderful character. But by the end,
because he's a peacemaker, he becomes the one who is
folded back into the life of the of the bonlieux
and disappointing, you know what, At the same time, I
see exactly what you're saying a little. But at the

(10:27):
same time, I think there's a very utopian vision in
this In this film, despite how it concludes to bite
the kind of downward half, I think it's a very
utopian vision of the power of friendship in the suburbs.
And the fact that you have this close relationship not
just between someone of African descent and someone of probably

(10:51):
North African Arab descent, but also a Jewish French person
is really that's not something that you see represented all
that all. And I think that they're the fantasy in
this film, that the three of them represent the possible
coming together of disenfranchised groups, but of course that doesn't

(11:12):
succeed at the end, But just the very fact of
them coming together and the interactions between them, despite despite
the context for them, the interactions between them are really wonderful.
There's something really powerful about watching these innections between these
three very very different people. But I do think Ubert
is the one who's distinguished by what he wants and

(11:35):
what he does, and the fact that he's folded back
into the Bodia is is very much part of that
downward spiral you know you mentioned, and of course it's
mentioned throughout the film. The story that's told at the beginning,
this guy falls off a roof and he watches everything's okay,
everything's okay, everything's okay, and then he splats on the ground.

(11:58):
I actually don't like that story very much, and maybe
that's why, because it's so fatalistic. Because the thing that
I think is more interesting, it's not the final destination.
It's the process of how you come down. And in
that process of falling down, of coming down, you see

(12:19):
the interconnections between these people in ways that are really powerful,
And as I said, I think it's somewhat utopian.

Speaker 8 (12:26):
I definitely agree that the film betrays Ubert by having
him really resist this kind of racially coded masculinity that
Vince really fetishizes in him, and the film, to an extent,
really fetishizes in him. But in his death, I mean,
in Vince's death and in Ubert's repossession of the gun

(12:47):
and in him perhaps shooting it, it both affirms Vince's
belonging as like a brother worthy of avenging, but it
also reinscribes Hubert within this discourse of violence. And retaliation
that he had denounced throughout the entire film, right, And
I mean it also makes a racist move of naturalizing
blackmail gun violence in a character who had spent the
entire film rejecting it. There's a lot to commend in

(13:10):
their friendship, but I think it's also a little bit
problematic the way that the film really goes out of
its way stylistically to embed us in the white character's
imagination and in his fantasies and in his desires and
not giving us that interiority, and that it's psychology for
the black or the Arab characters. The film sort of
follows Vince in his fetishizing of Ubert's body, in his

(13:33):
blackness and his masculinity. For example, in the scene where
they enter the boxing gym for the first time, Vince
is sort of whispering to SAYID like, look at Ubert,
but he's really mad, and the film, the camera really
glides toward Ubert in this very fetishizing slow motion, and
we see him spotlet under a single light bulb and
he's boxing, and the Kioskuro factually, you know, shows his muscles,

(13:55):
and I don't know, I wonder about the extent to
which the film still reduces Ubert to his body. Even
though he's the most philosophical character, he's always sort of
reinscribed within discourses of the body. Evince will always say
things like, oh, I'm not like you, mister black Hercules, right,
whereas with Vince we get a lot of interiority, we

(14:17):
get a lot of psychology. And so the film sort
of does, in a way reinscribe the racist trope of
like white man equals brain whereas black min equals body.
It's a very ambivalent portrayal. I think of their friendship.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
Vincent is white, but he's also Jewish. He's also ethnicized,
if not as strongly as the other two. And mostly
that does happen through the home setting, because you see
the Manora, you see the Jewish grandmother. Interesting on how
aside from him, the only Jewish people represented in the
film are old people, the grandmother and then the old

(14:52):
man in the restroom who tells the story of Grimalfsky.
It's a risky move on the part of Cassavitz, who
is himself a French Jew. It's a risky move to
try to establish these connections between Tree. You could say,
an African French identity at something in common with Magreb

(15:14):
a North African French identity, because they're both products of
colonialism and post colonialism. You can't did the same thing
about Vince's Jewish identity. But there's a connection, and that's
what I think is part of the desire of this
film is to establish that connection between Vince and the
other two. I wonder how much that had to do

(15:36):
with very controversial reception at this film. Had he was
the fact that it's was criticized roundly because he's not
a part of that culture. He came to it as
very much as an outsider. Now, I think ultimately, you know,
the film has to be judged not on who he is,
but on what the film is and what the film

(15:57):
brings to or understanding of identities in both colonial potolocoust
we have to say to French culture, and in that respect,
the story of Grvolski is very peculiar. It's a little
bit like the seld Down. Everything's okay, everything's okay, Everything's okay.

(16:19):
Everybody else goes out to I'm sorry, I can't say
God to take a fit. Everyone goes outside the train car.
Listen to me, I sound like a prude. Everyone goes
outside to depcate, but Grinvolski is so preoccupied with not
putting his body on display that he basically, you know,
he basically misses the train. Evidently, one misunderstanding that many

(16:44):
people had about the story about Grovolski and the old
man in the in the bathroom is that he understood
it to be a story about Jews being sent to
concentration camps, to death camps during the during World War Two.
He says very specifically, they were going to Siberia, and
so Polish Jews found refuge temporarily in the Soviet Union

(17:05):
in Russia, but they were then recruited, forced by Stalin
to become part of these work squads in Siberia, and
many of them didn't survive. But it was also a
chance of survival that was not offered by death camps,
and so in that sense, it was like it was
a chance for Brinvolski to find the future, to find

(17:30):
life instead of freezing in the gold as he did.
He doesn't say, I don't think where they were when
the train stopped and they all got off, but you
do sort of wonder why didn't Brunowski walk around or
find somebody. You can't do this with a film. You
can't say, oh, why didn't he do this? And why
didn't he do that? But there is that element of

(17:50):
a kind of passive expectation of what is going to
happen to him, both in terms of not being willing
to get back on the train because he doesn't want
to show himself and missing out on the chance to
avoid the possibility of liberatia.

Speaker 5 (18:07):
It's funny that the movie starts off with the so far,
so good joke. I think that's the first VEO that
we hear on the film. We end with that. It
also comes up in the middle. There's also the story
that you're telling talking about. There's also the joke about
Batman that comes up, where a person is beating up

(18:28):
a nun and says, you know, you're not so tough Batman.
It's interesting that that one and the flight the Falling
story both of those. Vin says, I've heard that joke
before but with a rabbi, and I'm like, oh, okay,
but it's it is an interesting way to talk us

(18:48):
through the you know, to lighten the air with these jokes.
But the jokes are so depressing and the stories are
so depressing, like the idea of the Grimalsky story that
you're talking about, like, yeah, yeah, this is pretty funny.
This guy was trying to run follow the train, but
he kept dropping his pants and he kept pulling up
his pants, and yeah, he froze to death. It's just
this morbid punchline to it and no offense, but it

(19:14):
felt the little Parantino asked. The idea of like popping
in jokes and then using the jokes and the punchlines
is kind of a punch in the face kind of
thing to me. It speaks to the really stylized shooting
of this film. I mean when Lahn is mostly known
to me from looking at clips on Instagram where it's like,

(19:35):
can you believe the shot? These shots are incredible, the
whole thing with Cassel in front of the mirror and
that it's actually a different person who is pretending to
be Cassel, and that we moved through the frame and
we end up in Cassell's world where he's re enacting
the whole you're talking to me speech from taxi driver.
I mean, that's a beautiful shot, but so many of
these shots are gorgeous, and you know, you're talking about

(19:59):
like the fetishization of Hubert's body. I mean, so much
of this violence, so much of this world is fetishized,
and I think that, you know, Casovitz really went out
of his way to make the ben Lieuze very beautiful
and to just really make those almost otherworldly. You know,
you're talking about this utopian vision, and for me, it's

(20:20):
like the once they're in the bean Leus, it is gorgeous.
Everything looks really nice, and it's like you don't see
the squalor nearly as much as you think that you would.
It's not until they get to Paris where things shift.
And I know that he specifically went from being stereo
in Labanlieu's to mono once he gets outside and gets

(20:41):
into Paris, and just makes it a much more grab
world than we had in the projects. And it's an
interesting way that he's contradicting those two things. And you
were talking about the whole thing of him being this outsider,
and I know it was a big deal for him
to live with the actors in the projects before they
started production and just to try to give himself some

(21:02):
credibility because I think he knew he was very much
an outsider all of these guys, and there's a behind
the scenes clip where he's like, yeah, all of us
are pretty bourgeois, but you know, we're trying to get
some street cred here.

Speaker 8 (21:17):
And I mean it's really important to acknowledge as well that,
like the Bandli cinema was a genre of cinema that
really caught fire in the nineties. Right, Pasowtz isn't doing
something new, And a lot of films about the Banlu
are being made by people who live in Bondlus, especially
people who are Arab French themselves. And Harry Tard read

(21:37):
a really nice kind of critique about what white filmmakers
are doing differently in their depictions of the Banlu compared
with French Arab filmmakers. But it seems like white authored
Bandlu films don't tend to represent family backgrounds or living
spaces of Arab youth, just like we don't see inside
says Home. They don't tend to demonstrate interest in first

(21:59):
generation immigrants. They tend to express the anger and alienation
of young men regardless of ethnic origins, and tend to
focus on confrontations with police. They tend to sort of
point to a shared experience of exclusion that mask the
significance of ethnic difference and the difficulties that this difference presents.

(22:19):
And in these ways, the white authored Banlu films tend
to sort of reflect French universalism and resistance to multiculturalism,
whereas films about the Bandlu made by Arabic or bare
filmmakers tend to avoid or diffuse scenes of confrontation with
the police and instead be more interested in problems of
identification and integration and in addressing changes and values within

(22:43):
Maghrebi communities, including women's places within it. They tend to
look at gender roles more extensively, even if they also
demonstrate masculinity in crisis, and rather than centering groups of
unemployed youth, they tend to center kind of older people
who have put any illegal activities behind them, and sort
of look at interpersonal and intergenerational relationships more. Going back

(23:05):
to the Grunwalski story, talking about intergenerational relationships, it's interesting
that like a Vince is quoted as Jewish, but he
doesn't have the same accent as his grandma or his auntie,
and he doesn't seem to make any personal relationship. He
doesn't seem to make any personal connection or any understanding
of the Grunwalski story, and most people have read that

(23:28):
story as sort of like a reminder of the suffering
and the exclusion of Jewish people to sort of lend
Vince's anger credibility. But Vince himself seems to really distance
himself from Jewishness and instead appropriate kind of ghetto swag
and black music and sort of he shadow boxes. He
wants to be Ubert. He has the ring from Do

(23:49):
the Right Thing, you know, the radio Rahim. It would
be easy to read the film as a film about
the instability of masculinity and sort of the instability of
a gender that is always reflective and is always appropriative
and is so unstable, Like it would be interesting to
do a feminist oppositional reading of Latin, even though I
think the film is not feminist. It really revels in misogyny.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
But also related to that, women are totally imaginary, and
as I think, the only real women you see are
the group of sisters sitting together, and I believe that
Sayid's sister, and then the old grandmother and the mother.
But they talk about women obsessively. They talk about sex
with women, It's like women are completely imaginary creatures in

(24:34):
this in this film, they have absolutely no, no blood
and flash existence. And I find that interesting because I
think the film does try to avoid what would be
standard stereotypical representations of the sexism associated with Mania culture,

(24:57):
and there's been so much attention brought to them through
the work of women oh writers and tailmakers, and it's
something that bothers me a little in this film, but
I don't see any other way that it could have
been done. This, to me is something else that's very utopian.
Like it's Starrett, it's just fine for women to live
in this imaginary realm and though in the minds of

(25:21):
the main characters, but as long as there's no real
grounding of women in any kind of substantial way except
for typical motherly or grandmotherly rule like getting the vegetables
for dinner and picking up the wrong one. I mean,
it's just very purposely dissociated from any female fear that

(25:42):
might exist in the Navalio, which I find disappointing. But
at the same time, I do think it tries to
This film is trying, and this may be a nipa
of the film. It's trying to avoid the kind of
typical sects of representations of men in Boleo culture. Yeah,
I went for more. But there is, however, the one

(26:05):
male character who does acquire a certain kind of I
hate to use this word demin and present is infinite
delf because you know, when it comes time to just
show how tough he is, he can't do it. He can't.
He not only can't kill the skinhead. And by the way,
you know that is Casaves is playing the role of

(26:25):
the of the skinhead. He can't do it, but he
also throws up after he can't do it. I mean,
this is someone who there's a real gap between these
aspirations towards being a tough guy and the reality of
what he is and how he lives in the in
the world. He may talk a lot about violence, but
he can't abide it.

Speaker 5 (26:47):
What doesn't he keep his gun in an oven to
kind of a domestic sphere type of thing. Most of
the time they're talking about fucking each other's sisters or mothers,
and then the I think we see Vince's mother with
a song machine that I want to say we see
Sayid's mother or with a song machine as well. So
they are so trapped in that domestic space that we, yeah,

(27:10):
we don't see them, because so much of this movie
is them wandering in the streets, the three men wandering
the streets, and they run into a lot of people,
but they sure don't run into women. They are very
much hidden from view.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
Now, Yeah, and the women are very circumscribed obviously, the
rare ones that you do see women, it's always cooking
and so on.

Speaker 8 (27:31):
And there are films about the Bondlu that do things differently, right,
You could look at films made by Arab Brench women
about the experiences of women in the Bondlu, like zeide
gorb Valta's film Remember Me, which was made a year
after Let And you could, if you wanted to do
a program of films that sort of look at white
outsider's perspectives of the Bondlu and then complicate those perspectives.

(27:53):
You could also show that and with Celine Siama's film
Girlhood and sort of then have a conversation about the
colonial dynamics at play when these directors come in and
build their careers on stories of marginalization, but without arguably
making any tangible benefits for the people being represented on screen.
It's interesting to think about, like the ways that Latin

(28:15):
sort of criticizes Vince's swaggering machismo bullshit because it always fails, right,
and it always it creates conflicts with the only people
who seem to really care about him. It tears apart
his friend group. But it's also the same kind of
swaggering muchismo bullshit that the cops are using. And the

(28:38):
difference is that when you play the same game as
the cops, when you use this kind of toxic masculinity,
you're doomed to fail. You're doomed to be killed. Your
friends are doomed to be killed because the state's power
is legitimized, right, the power of the police is legitimized.
When they do toxic shit, it's legitimate. And so that's
like that, I guess that's like a more feminist oppositional

(28:58):
reading of the film. But at the same time, the
camera seems to really be really be reveling in Vince's machismo,
like the way in the in the taxi driver sequence,
the way we don't get critical distance, right, we don't
see Vince from a distance, we don't get to critique
his sort of like playful performativity of gender. The camera

(29:19):
is directly in front of his face, giving his words
like the maximal impact. Right, And when they go to
the gallery, they treat women like currency, Like Said is like, yober, like,
go talk to those girls for me. Remember when I
brought you a taco last week, you know? And Vince
is like, no, no, get to get to get one
for me, right, and so and then Said goes up
and he just like expects the women to like automatically

(29:41):
give them their numbers for sex. Like it's just like
it's so transactional, You're like, what planet are you from?
Like the one of the women offers a really nice critique.
It's like this nice line where she's like, we were fine,
we wanted to talk to you, but when you get
all aggressive, like how can we respect you? But the
boys they don't have any answer for this that. They
just get louder and work aggressive, like say it immediately

(30:01):
raises his hand in a threatening gesture, and the soundtrack
get like throughout the film, the soundtrack really aligns us
with these men's experience. Right, it rises and it gets
more aggressive in the gallery sequence as their aggression builds
and it cuts off right when they leave. So the
film is irrevocably, always, always, always, and often very beautifully

(30:22):
on the side of these three boys, right, really implanting
us in their brains, especially Vince's.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
But also showed us the frustration of those desires. I mean,
we get inside their heads, yes, but they never can
act on what they're doing. There's a kind of basic
however strong and macho they act, there's a basic impotence
on the part of all of them. And of course
you could say that a real standard reading in some
ways of men like them and how they act out.

(30:53):
But it doesn't go anywhere on the film. I go
back to the Tarantino reference. I don't want to dwell
on it because people have awful lot, but there's something
very performative about a Vincent saying, you know, it's like
you talking to me, talking to me, you're talking to me.
Kind of changes a little bit each time. I'm not

(31:14):
sure it changes radically, but it reminds me very much
of that story that drives me crazy. Of goes past
one floor, Oh, everything's okay, next floor, everything's okay, and
then splots on the ground. There's this attempt to render
that that theme from taxi driver in a meaningful way.

(31:35):
But it's nothing but an attempt at changing things that
are never going to really change. No matter what differently
you say, you talking to me, you're talking to me,
you're talking to me, it always ends up in the
same in the same place. And that goes back to
lou what you said, of course, about the fatalism of
the of the of the film. I don't want to

(31:57):
insist though, on the difference in the film that's brought
by Vinta's character being Jewish. It could be brought out
in more detailed and interesting ways, I suppose, but I
think that's something in this film that can't quite so
easily be absorbed into Well, I don't know what narrative

(32:20):
I'm talking about. Fatalism. Well, yeah, there is a fatalism
associated with what it means to be Jewish and poor
in contemporary and a post holocust in a post final
solution way in France. But I do think there's this
real attempt and that part of the reason why I
call the film so utopian and a vision. There's a
real attempt to try to trace a Jewish man's path

(32:46):
along the line not identical to but along the lines
kind of following some of the lines of the two
other of the two other characters, and to me that
the real distinction about the film. I'm not saying it's
particularly well done necessarily, but it's a fact of difference
in the film that I think makes them a little
more interesting. Well, I shouldn't say a little more interesting.

(33:09):
I think it's an interesting film or no matter how
you look at it, but that particular difference I think
really fanned out in the film as being significant in
terms of how there's an attempt to kind of I
don't want to use the word deconstruct, but redefine what
it means to talk about friendships in the Balia too,

(33:32):
reassess them in different in different ways. Because I think
everyone knows what the basis of oppression is of North
African and African men in the suburbs. It's colonialism and
post colonialism. That's not hard to wrap your mind around.
I think a lot of people would find it very
difficult to see the connections between a post final solution

(33:57):
French identity in France and colonialism and those colonialism. They're
not the same, and any attempts to try to make
them the same or even that similar are going to fail.
But there is an attempt to create that connection in
this film and that I find admirable. But even if
it doesn't go anywhere, the insistence on Vince's vulnerability in

(34:21):
those last scenes with the skinheads, I find that you
could say that that's adopting one of the standard ways
of looking at Jewish Men, especially in a post Holocaust era,
that is as weak and insufficiently manly and et cetera.

(34:42):
And the film doesn't do that much with it, because
after all, its and dies, But I still think it's
a really interesting attempt that problematizes somewhat the standard view
of the ballieu. It's only having to do with Black
African and North African Idanady. I think what's.

Speaker 8 (35:03):
Really important too is to think about what a utopian
kind of version of Latin, and even more utopian if
you think of it as utopian version of Lein, would
look like. And I'm thinking about Jeanese Duret, which is
by Zeida gorb Volta. I think it's two thousand and one,
and what she does is she her protagonists are two women,

(35:24):
and she shows the audience the demolition of Acte and
then she shows different reactions to this demolition from the
residents there.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
And it's it's.

Speaker 8 (35:35):
Interesting because if we understand the Banlieu as a spatial
manifestation of a political problem, right and a racist, violent history,
then if the Bandlu signifies state and social exclusion, then
demolishing it on screen can be a really powerful symbol
and that can be utopian perhaps. And there are other

(35:56):
films like one hundred Percent Arabic which show the ban
Lutu be like really rich with history and memory and
community and a place that's often joyous and really effectively
can combat religious fundamentalism. Unlike the French Government right and
other films about the Banlou, they chose not to see
the big city at all. They don't make any foray

(36:17):
into Paris because they want to cut off the residents
from the oppressive kind of spatial logistics of the city
and instead focus on bonds within the bun Lu. So
these are three different kind of ideas of what a
utopian Bandu film could look like, and they're all sort
of interesting productive alternatives to representations like lain. A film

(36:38):
can be really utopian when it explores what equity could
look like, what revolution and its results could look like,
and what a world could look like without spatial and
racial divisions. And there are oppositional films out there, There
are utopian films out there, but the films that get
awards like Lahen will keep showing people in power visions
that they recognize.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Right, Definitely problem with it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (37:02):
The other very disheartening thing for me is just like
I was saying, there's very few women present in this,
but there are kids. They're younger men that hang out
with the older men. Like we see them on the rooftops.
We see the one kid telling a pretty bad story
talking about stories again, telling that story to Vin's about
this celebrity and he doesn't know who the celebrity was,

(37:23):
and the story just really doesn't go anywhere. But it's
like this whole bonding of the younger generation with the
older generation and just seeing how they are still going
to be stuck in this no matter what. It feels like.
None of these kids that are hanging out with the
three friends just here or there anywhere. And I do
appreciate that the one the kid that's telling that story

(37:46):
the way that he just kind of throws himself out
of the trio when he thinks that there's going to
be trouble and he's just like, oh, this doesn't look good.
I'm out of here, and just beats himself out. But yeah,
that whole idea of like this is so cyclical and
we'll just continue to go. And there's only one good
cop in the whole film that we see, who well barely. Yeah,

(38:09):
And I know there was a real concern from Kasovits
as far as I want to show that there's at
least one decent cop so I can't be basically accused
of saying all cops are bad, And same thing with
when it comes to like, oh, well, I made sure
that there was a good black character as well as
a drug dealing black character, because I don't want there

(38:29):
to be accusations that all black people are drug dealers.
So I'm like, all right, I understand where you're coming from.
But it's just it feels a little semi instancere as
far as I have to do this so that I
can't be accused of something else, it's like, stand by
your guns and just have these characters be these characters.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
The one supposedly partially sympathetic cop I think is not
really I mean, I do think the view of the
cops in this is despite what and it's disturbing to
me that says that, you know, oh they're a good
cop and bad cops. No, there aren't in relationship to
the ball of you. There's no such thing as a
good cop. I mean, yeah, the one you're right, the

(39:08):
one you're talking about. Mike does say, I'll get you
more money. See you can. You can create your gym
someplace else to you bear. Okay, that's sweet, but those
are band aid they're not there's nothing deep about them
at all.

Speaker 5 (39:23):
And that brings up the whole question too as far
as these riots happen. And we see a lot of
historical right footage, possibly some right footage that was manufactured
for the film, But this whole idea of Hubert's gym
has been burned down as part of one of these riots.
And I know Kassovitch talks about people burn down their

(39:43):
own stuff just to show that there's a problem. That's
always the most difficult thing for me, and I think
that's a really difficult thing for other people to understand.
This is the whole idea of like burning down your
own neighborhood. I mean, for me, it's just like, yeah,
go to Paris and start burning down those buildings, why
don't you?

Speaker 1 (39:59):
I mean, yeah, yeah, the gym has been we're told
that it's been decimated. We don't see exactly what that
means in the film. I think that those scenes of violence,
in terms of the Bonia itself are ir relatively restrained.
I mean there's a big boom, you know, at the
at the beginning of the film a bit. I'm not

(40:20):
sure why that is, because the demonstrations that led to
the deaths of various individuals, including the one who's singled
out in the film, those were pretty raw and pretty intense.

Speaker 8 (40:33):
Suspicion that Vince was involved in burning down his gym,
I think it's just a symptom of like a greater
theme in the film, which is that everything is breaking apart,
everything is falling down, nothing, there's nothing you can depend
on anymore. Right, identity becomes unstable, not just Vince's kind
of exaggerating, exaggerated, like self defeating performance of masculinity, but
also like the drunk man Vincent Linden, you can't express

(40:56):
his own name. No one's ever really sure like which
far or Mohammed people are talking about because there are
like different ones in the cite, and our identity is
also really unstable, like as viewers were sort of placed
in mirrors or were figured as art exhibits. And there's
this like uneasy reflective aspect of the film where it's
sort of like structured like a mirror. It's split halfway

(41:19):
through between the Sita and Paris, and it begins and
ends with the same story. So there's that reflection. But
like logic seems to be breaking down as well, right,
like how did a car get into a gym? Why
is there a cow in the cite?

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Language? Right?

Speaker 8 (41:32):
Like language is breaking down too, right, These interactions seem
so meaningless. Jokes aren't funny because you've heard them before,
stories have no point, and yet throughout there's this longing
to connect, right in references to other films, there's so
much intertextuality and references to American music. And the Greenwalski

(41:52):
story is about two men, you know, trying to grab
a hold of one another, and you sort of see
that image reflected in the blow up of the two
hens almost touching from this is teen Chapel. It's like
blown up against the wall and it's right right when
Vince is like, oh, like, go off without me. I
don't need you guys. Anyway, he's sort of he's standing
in front of a sculpture of two hens that look

(42:12):
like they're about to cut him. So it's I can't
tell if that's threatening or tender, but yeah, there's it's
a real it's a world in disarray.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
Well that's just kid. It's always on the verge between
the two. It's always there's never anything that is solidified
into one single thing. It's always to be this could
be that it's ambivalent, it's contradictory, but what happens with
those ambivalence is in the film, and what happens with
those contradictions is another another question entirely.

Speaker 5 (42:42):
I love what you're saying, Lou about the reflection, and
especially that the movie really starts with the reflection. But
it's so odd that it's the Earth instead of the
Moon inside of the reflective. It's basically like a puddle
that you see the Earth reflected, and then it gets
hit with a Molotov cocktail because it looks almost like

(43:05):
we're in space and we're talking about that story of
the guy who's falling. You know, so good, so far
that kind of thing, and then you see the Earth
and you're just like, oh, he's it's almost as if
he's falling towards the surface of our planet. And then
instead what we see coming in At first it looks
like it's some sort of a meteor or something that's
going to crash into the planet, but then you realize

(43:26):
it's a Molotov cocktail and it lights the entire screen
on fire, and that's when we learned that the Earth
was a reflection inside of the water. Gorgeous, gorgeous shot.
But I love what you're saying as far as the
reflective nature of things. Right there in the first major
shot of the film, we have that reflective.

Speaker 8 (43:45):
Yeah, And I think this really speaks to the political
inadequacy of the film too, because it's like, oh, I'm
going to show you an image of revolution, right this
Moolotov cocktail coming to the earth, But also like, what
are we supposed to do with that? The Earth is
blowing up? That doesn't inspire anything in me, right, it
just tells me I'm about to die. I wanted to
get back to the point that you made earlier, Mike,

(44:05):
about the way that the film is divided into like
pause of It's apparently wanted to shoot one episode in color,
the other in black and white, one in thirty five millimeters,
one in sixteen, but instead we just have the site
by day and Paris by night. The CTE. In these
long traveling shots which require an establishment in space, right,

(44:27):
you need to lay down tracks, whereas the center the
city Paris is shot on foot with a handheld camera.
And then like you said, Mike, we have this mix
between stereo and mono, and in the CTE we have
like short focal distance, so the characters are really integrated
into their wide surroundings in their long takes, whereas in

(44:48):
Paris it's long focal distance to detach the figures from
their backgrounds. The whole environment changes, and it really to me,
it really naturalizes problematically this division between Paris and between
the Banlieux, and it sort of really entrenches this division
that I think is harmful because if we assume that

(45:09):
this division is natural, if we make films in which
this division is so palpable, then it makes it easier
for people living in Paris to ignore the other side
and to assume that it really is a foreign country
and it really is not their problem. I think making
films in which the division is so stark it rubs

(45:30):
me the wrong way. It seems dangerous.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
It is dark. But at the same time, I feel
like when we get into Paris, it's like we've been
dropped in a completely different, well, a completely unfamiliar world.
And that scene in the apartment building, I'm sorry, and
if we're going to show my age and my formation,
but I felt like I was in a good All film,
that we were plopped right into the middle of something

(45:55):
like masculine seminin in terms of the kind of ridiculously
exaggerated antics of the guy he's staying in the apartment.
And even the art gallery to me looks so much
like a joke in a in a Godell film. There's
nothing about that Paris that is recognizable. I don't think
is recognizable unless it's in the most abstract sense of

(46:19):
you now, oh, it's the filmic representation of Paris.

Speaker 5 (46:22):
Now.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
I don't know if other people get the get the
feeling of go dab like I did, but the art gallery, certainly,
it's like this, let's find a completely irrelevant, frankly irrel
of the almost anybody's world space. Bought that into the
into the film. It gives Paris kind of an unreal

(46:43):
distance in the In the film, it defamiliarizes Paris in
some ways, it makes it a strange entity. And frankly,
I find Paris more threatening to them, the three of them,
than the than the Volieu is because it's so unfamiliar
and so it's freatening, it's very unsafe.

Speaker 8 (47:03):
Right, which emphasizes that these characters don't belong there, right.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
But that's not a bad thing, I think, but it's
you know, as a critique of the of the Parisian environment. Yeah,
they certainly don't belong there. But who does belong in
Paris except for.

Speaker 8 (47:21):
A sixties filmmaker like Good or Peter Kassovitz, Right.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (47:26):
I mean you've got, of course, the stock shot of
the Eiffel Tower, but I love that too, when Sayda
is like, oh watch this and he snaps his finger
like he's going to turn off the Eiffel Tower, and
he does it a couple times and they're just like, oh,
get the fuck out of here, and then they all
walk away and then the tower goes and it's just like, yeah,
you can't really capture that magic.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Sorry, that's a good point, you know.

Speaker 8 (47:48):
Should we can we talk more about Asterix. You've brought
him up in your discussion of the goodar like Elements.

Speaker 1 (47:55):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 5 (47:59):
He reminded me a little too of speaking of Tarantino,
of Paul Thomas Anderson and the character that Alfa Molina
plays in Bookie Nights where they go into that strange
space and this guy's just unhinged and you're just like, oh, man,
get the fuck out of there. This guy is no good.
And then when they find out that the weed that

(48:20):
they sold them was shit anyway, it's like you came
all this way to buy weed from this asshole. But yes,
Astris is fascinating to me, and the whole them trying
to even find his place. That's such an ordeal that
they had to go through.

Speaker 4 (48:36):
It coded a gay, right, very very gay, and to
me that's of course, like what hangs over the film
is the possibility the very homosocial connection between the three men.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
But I think the possibility of a gay connection between
them is always hint is hinted that but very very sadly,
and it becomes solidified in the character of us and
I wish that had been export a little bit more
on that in a film. It's making them kind of
a cartoon character who literally a cartoon character who just

(49:09):
disappears in a film.

Speaker 8 (49:11):
I think there's a great opportunity to do like a
nuanced sexy gala hen like I would love to see
that personally. Asterix is like Kasovitz's Skinhead. I think they're
kind of two reflective versions of Vince's identity. And what
I went talking about the Skinheads, there's this we see
Vince and the Skinhead from the back, and their heads

(49:34):
look almost identical, and I think it's drawing a parody
between Kassovitz's Skinhead and Vince. And they're also really mirrored
when they're both coughing and vomiting at the end of
that sequence. They're doing it in the same way on
like opposite sides of the screen, but at the same height.
But Asterix is sort of also an interesting, an interesting

(49:57):
parallel of Vince, Like Strix is also doing this kind
of goofy posturing of non white masculinity with his nunchucks, right,
and he's reckless and he's out of control, and he's
like a heightened version of the qualities that are driving
Vince apart from his friends. But unlike Vince, Asterix is
totally in charge. He's at ease with his surroundings, with

(50:18):
his body, with his gun, and Vince is chastised and
infantilized for touching Astrix's gun, and Astix then immediately like
grabs Vince's gun and reveals complete mastery over it. Right,
he fools Vince into thinking that he's so tough he
can play Russian roulette, and it completely invalidates any power
that Vince felt. And Vince is like trying to practice

(50:42):
tough guy de Niro masculinity. But Asterix gets to his
lines first. He's like, are you aiming at me? Are
you aiming at me? And so, yeah, I think it totally.
It just serves to totally undermine Vince's like already tenuous
grasp on masculinity and also to exacerbate the tensions between
the male friends.

Speaker 5 (51:00):
Yeah, and I forgot that Vince actually pulls a gun
on a cop as well, so it's twice that he
is kind of thwarted. And with that one, I know,
Hubert like pushes his arm like, don't shoot a cop
kind of thing, like you said, he's in that peacekeeper
role and talking again about the masculinity and the kind
of homosocial aspects of this. I forgot about the whole

(51:21):
thing where he's trying to Vince is trying to give
Sayit a haircut and ends up fucking it up so
much that said has to wear a hat through the
rest of the movie pretty much. It's just like, this
could be a tender scene, and it is kind of tender,
but at the same time, he screws it up. He
doesn't know how to use those clippers whatsoever and can't
fix it, and I wouldn't trust him to fix it either.

Speaker 8 (51:43):
Yeah, Sayd is such a great character. I mean, of
course the awards went to like the professional actor who's
also white and comes from a filmmaking family. Right, Pasel
got all the awards, but t Saekta, Maui and uber
Kunde like totally deserved them. They're brilliant.

Speaker 1 (51:58):
Yeah, they're totally great in this and I tricked a
little bit about them. The accurate place Sight has been
in other films, right, what about that?

Speaker 5 (52:06):
Hubert has been in quite a few things, not very
much that I've seen, definitely much more in the French
or African milieu. But yes, said, eventually crossed over into
American films, and when I show saw him show up
in things like I think John Wick four or John
Wick three, he's like the elder. And then he is

(52:27):
in things like even g I Joe Rise of Cobra.
I think so, yeah, he's definitely in. I think his
most famous role for most Americans would be the role
that he plays as one of the fighters that is
alongside Wonder Woman in the Wonder Woman film, the first one.

Speaker 1 (52:43):
Yeah, this film is well known for launching that's on
Cassel into the starsphere. And I think he great, but
the other two should. Yeah, they deserve their place in
their place in the firmament as well.

Speaker 5 (52:57):
I know that Hubert was in and The Constant Gardener,
which I haven't seen yet because I just I don't
think I can take two hours of watching somebody garden.

Speaker 8 (53:08):
One thing that I think said I don't fully appreciate
and I wish I did, is the way that he's
speaking Tissi. The three protagonists are speaking the language of
the site, which is called TESSI. Right, and it's this
like product of and you've probably know more about this
Judith than I do, so like jump in and correct me.
But it's it's been called semiotic warfare.

Speaker 5 (53:29):
Oh wow, oh yeah, cass Of, it's talked about that
on the commentary.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (53:32):
This way of speaking that shortens and reverses words and
it plays with grammar and it infuses French with words
from other languages. Is this like rejection of normative French, right,
And it's really creative and it's really figurative, and it's
really poetic, and it's this shared form of communication, right,
So it really reverses the exclusion of inequity and excluding
normative French. It reverses the exclusion from normative French society

(53:57):
to say, like we have our own language and you
can't understand. But it keeps getting because it's so prevalent
in rap like, it keeps getting absorbed by mainstream French
culture and so it has to keep rapidly evolving in response.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
And so that gets hard, right, it's.

Speaker 8 (54:12):
Hegemony, right, It sucks, but it was The film was
deemed like totally incomprehensible to speakers of correct French, and
they wanted they were like, let's use subtitles, and Castovitz
was like, no, no, no, that's exoticism. But so what
they did instead was use post synchronization to like clarify
different expressions that were really important. But maybe I'm missing
out on more misogyny, like I can I can live

(54:34):
with that, but I do wish that I understood the
language better because it's so sad to see they're saying like, oh,
those pigs, and I'm like, no one talks like that anymore,
Like it just makes it cute instead of relevant. I
don't know.

Speaker 5 (54:46):
Kassowitz talks about this on the commentary that at the
beginning they're talking about How's lavash and he's like, oh, yeah,
that's how. We were referring to cops and I was like, oh, okay,
so a different animal, right, But then when the the
how shows up later in the city center, I was
just like, is this a reference to that perhaps every where?

Speaker 1 (55:08):
Yeah? Yeah, oh yeah, Well it's a common expression in France,
like all the that's like you're frustrated with something, you say,
oh you know, oh the cow. It doesn't the same,
but but it's a it's an idiom in French. In
French that use, you know, quite commonly, and so to
give that concrete form is I think it's funny, but

(55:28):
it's also a sign of, you know, something completely off,
like this way of reading adiomatic expressions that takes them literally.
And there's some interesting plays with what's literal and what's
what's figured, as in the film lou I supposedly speak
fulent French, I am lost, and much of the dialogue
in this film like you.

Speaker 9 (55:49):
Gott to move to the project, you gotta get some
to exactly listening to Verlanon, Yeah, like you can get
the burg comes from like mostly a switching.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
Of a hob but it's not really it's never quite literal.
That's the thing, or for fun, but you know, it's
it's hard to follow. And when they when they really
do it, like if they talk about things other than
the then I'm really I tend to be really color
a loss. It's it's tough to follow.

Speaker 5 (56:22):
Is it kind of like a like the Cockney slang
where there's substituting like the apples some pears and yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
Love that ship.

Speaker 8 (56:29):
Yeah, I mean with my stupid American accident, I can't,
I can't, I shouldn't and I can't approximate it, but yeah,
it's it's so much cooler than that though, you know.

Speaker 5 (56:38):
Go hang out at the pub and just start thrown
out like oh with that one. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (56:46):
Even my partner would like you'd be like, no, I.

Speaker 5 (56:48):
Have the All right, let's go ahead and take a break,
and we're going to play an interview with Jeanette Vincendo,
the author of La from two thousand and five. It
is a fantastic book all about Matthew Kassowitz's movie. And
we'll be back with that right after these brief messages.

Speaker 10 (57:07):
Seven the sixth Sense, Sweet sixteen, nine Songs, seven Brides
for seven, Brothers, twelve Angry Men. In the versatile world
of cinema, numbers everywhere, and on the Film by Numbers podcast,
we explore just about any aspect from the movie world,
from film history to filmmaking, to specific movements and directors,
and much more. Besides, each topic on Film by Numbers

(57:28):
is dictated by the number of the episode. Brought to
you by Outward Film Network and hosted by me Phil
Slatter and filmmaker David Woods, we will take you on
a journey across the vast landscape of film with interviews
with award winning filmmakers and academics, featuring discussion debate and
recommendations available on all the main podcast providers. If you
love film, join us at Film by Numbers.

Speaker 5 (57:55):
So I was very surprised to learn that you had
written about that and then fantastic book, by the way,
because I usually associate your taste more with Melville, you know,
Pepe La, Monco, Brigite Bardeaux, and then Land just seems
to be an outlier. But so I'm so curious, why
did you choose to write about that.

Speaker 7 (58:13):
I chose to write about Latin because two reasons really.
One is in terms of the cinema and what I
was teaching that this is a film that students loved,
you know, from the moment it came out, and I've
been teaching it almost not so, I mean i've stopped recently,
but you know, for decades really, and I was always

(58:35):
surprised at how relevant it seemed to students. But when
I first decided to write about it, which was, you know,
a few years after the film had come out, I
first wrote an article in a collection in two thousand
and then I turned it into then expanded it into
a book which came out in two thousand and five.

(58:57):
And the other, the other you know, the interest of
film and the fact that it never ceased to interest
what myself but also the students. I thought, there's something
interesting in this film. The other reason was more to
biographical is because I was myself brought up in the
suburbs of Paris, and I was seeing this new phenomenon

(59:20):
of what people call the film the Bonnieu, that Bonneu
being the suburbs of Paris, and I thought, well, you know,
I know about the Bonnieux myself, because that's where I
come from. And I was interested to confront my own
knowledge with the representation in the film, if you like.

(59:40):
And then when I wrote the book, as you may know,
if you there's an annex where I talk about visiting
the place where it was shot, which was a bit traumatic.
And I realized then that the kind of suburbs that
I had known was very different from you know, because
when I was a child, it was earlier, and the

(01:00:02):
sociological makeup of the Parisian suburbs was different. So, and
I have more recently I've written as about other films
are set in the suburbs of Paris. So as I said,
it's both, I suppose it's both a scholarly interest because
of the films and especially Latin that's a particularly interesting film,

(01:00:23):
and also in my own history, you know, with a
way of kind of looking at it with that perspective.

Speaker 5 (01:00:32):
It's interesting. We recently spoke about Two Men in Manhattan,
and that begins with that story kind of the United
Nations and showing what it is it the Jewish boy,
the Italian boy, and the Irish boy. And then you
come over to l and you get the Arab man,
the Jewish man, and the Black man, the African man,

(01:00:53):
and they have that kind of mix again, is very interesting,
but such a such a world away from where we
were in eighteen fifty nine.

Speaker 7 (01:01:01):
Absolutely, yes, And until the nineteen sixties, the French suburbs
were you know, more like villagers around the city and
then they hugely expanded. It expanded in the nineteen sixties
because of the modernization of France and the kind of
economic boom of what is known as the Tone Glorieus.
The thirty glorious years were you know, between basically the

(01:01:24):
end of the war and the early nineteen seventies, and
with General Dogaul and the fact that they needed to
house all these these new population, so and my parents
were sort of typical of an earlier immigration, if you like,
which was they came from the country, and so there
was what was called rural exodus after the war, where

(01:01:47):
a lot of people left farming, which was the case
of my father my father and moved to Paris so
to and usually at beginning to the suburbs of Paris.
So that's when they expanded it. And in the nineteen
sixties and seventies, this kind of more brutalist architecture we
associate with the suburbs of Paris now with sort of

(01:02:08):
impoverished population living in the kind of places we see
in Latin has become a sort of synonymous with the
suburbs of Paris, with the Bolieu. But in the early
earlier times it was it was, it was kind of
very different. So so yeah, so when we see the

(01:02:30):
in Latin, which was made in nineteen ninety five, there
is this trio of young men as and white Jewish,
North African BIRR and black and it corresponds partly to
some extent. Although the film is very is tragic. Of course,
there's a tragic ending and it depicts very difficult social background.

(01:02:53):
It's also there's a kind of utopian aspect to it,
in the sense that even though those three young men
are from different ethnic backgrounds, it's not a film about racism.
It isn't a film about them having difficulty with each
other because they are Black, White, Jewish and North African.

(01:03:14):
So and that is I think a French specificity, let's say,
compared to American films that deal with you know, the projects,
as you say, in American cinema, that tend to emphasize
more racial conflict, the French films tend not to so
with Latin, these three young men are more like a

(01:03:35):
unified group fighting against the police, fighting against the adults,
fighting against women. But they unify, they're not fighting against
each other in not in terms of their racial and
ethnic makeup. So and that is that's a very important

(01:03:55):
aspect of the film, but one that is I think,
very very specifically French.

Speaker 5 (01:04:01):
Yeah, it was an interesting time that there was Latin
happening in France and just a few years prior we
had Minister Society and Boys in the Hood In the US,
were there more benleueu films? Was that kind of a
subgenre for a little while in France?

Speaker 7 (01:04:18):
Yes, there were well, in fact, just before Latin, just
before the nineteen nineties, in the nineteen eighties, there was
the beginning of another subject on which is called the
cinema bur sort of films made by filmmakers of North
African origin and that are always sat in the in
the suburbs and the and the cinema bur was is

(01:04:42):
an important movement, and there's been a lot of attention
about academics and people writing about those films. Nevertheless, they
were not particularly popular with audiences, and so after that,
with Latin, you begin to have more of a more
popular filmmaking. But what is interesting is that I think

(01:05:04):
Latin created a sub genre in which it is almost unique,
because although there have been others that followed Liane, actually
none of them has ever equalled its level of the
combination of kind of sociological interest and popular success. And

(01:05:29):
until possibly in twenty nineteen, there's a film called Limiserable
by director called Largely, which is often seen as a
kind of a new Lain, which, in extent, to some
extent it is. But I think interestingly, Laine continues, sorry
let me start it, Lane continues to be celebrated, and

(01:05:51):
as you know, this year is the thirtieth anniversary of
its making since it came out in May nineteen ninety five.
In May of this year it will be the thirtieth anniversary,
and the celebration has already begun, including there was a
stage musical that Mattyo Kasovitch put together and which I
saw in Paris at the end of twenty twenty four.

(01:06:15):
So that film has been endlessly worshiped and celebrated and imitated,
but somehow never quite equaled. So you have derivations if
you like. There are comedies mostly and things like that,
but not somehow, I think it really remains unique.

Speaker 5 (01:06:37):
I have to ask you about the musical. Can you
tell me what a musical version of Land is like?

Speaker 7 (01:06:43):
Well, it was very interesting, I mean, and we had
a little surprise because at the end of the show
suddenly two or three people jumped on stage and there
was Matyo Kasovic himself and his children. I think, well
what they did was that there was a very it's
quite interesting background with using projection and so on, and

(01:07:08):
of the decor which looks like the environment in line
and the buildings and so on. It's quite similar. And
then a number of scenes are expanded if you like.
And sung. So people are singing and dancing. The dancing
is more as you can imagine, more like break dance,

(01:07:28):
and the music, you know, it's along the lines of
rap and hip hop music. It was actually rather interesting.
Some of the scenes were really very much like lifted
out of the film and very very similar. One difference,
I think one thing they've tried to address is the

(01:07:49):
recurrent criticism that Latin is again is very much a
male orientation. So we have these three male heroes and
then the women very marginal to the story. In that sense,
it's quite similar to the Jean Pierre Melville film, and
so there is for example, there was a very attractive

(01:08:12):
scene with a female singer, which definitely was not in
the film, so so, but again it remained marginal. It's
quite so. The visuals is it's in the visual spectacle
a vocla and through the decor. And then there were
scenes with people acting out scenes from the film, you know,

(01:08:36):
with three young men from you know, as you have
them in the film. I think it was quite successful.
It doesn't really add much to the film, but if
you're interested in the film, it's it's worth seeing. I
know that he was intending to take it to. It
has a rather limited run in Paris, and it was
intending to take it to provincial cities. I think it

(01:08:57):
did quite well. I don't know if it's yeah, I
had gone elsewhere, but it's it's certainly, you know, I
think yet another manifestation to me of the fact that
the film itself has become like a myth as well.
It's sort of it's no longer just a film. And
when it first came out in nineteen ninety five, it

(01:09:18):
was called a phenomendo associatives social phenomenon because it went
beyond being just a film.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:09:26):
Politicians watched it in the Elizi Palace, it was shown
in schools they you know, and and as I know
from my own experience of having taught it at university
where I was teaching, but also I was invited to
many schools in the UK to talk about it because

(01:09:46):
it was on the program first students doing French to
go to university. So I went to a lot of
schools and over the years I realized at one point
that I was talking to students who were not were
not born when the film came out, and yet they
loved it. And one of the questions I always asked
them is why is this film relevant to you? You know,

(01:10:09):
what do you see in it? Because it's an old film.
For them, it was like a very old film, black
and white with no stars. Well, of course one of them,
Van sant Castell, became a star thanks to it, and
they all thought it was it spoke to them that
it was still relevant to them. And these were people

(01:10:33):
from you know, rather privileged schools in London in the UK,
not at all from the same background as in the film,
and yet they saw it as talking to them, these
young people, their anxieties and the fact that the film
is very thrilling, it creates this kind of urgency in

(01:10:54):
a number of ways. They also thought that, of course
the black and white images made it more timeless, which
is true. So with my students we did experiments of
looking on the DVD. You can find some scenes in
color as it was originally shot. And when you say
it in color, all the students said, oh, my god,

(01:11:15):
it looks so dated, and partly because they thought, oh
that the track suits look completely dated because they escaped me.
But they could see that and they said, in black
and white it makes it kind of yeah, timeless and
so both socially relevant but also timeless. And I think
that's one reason why the film is done so well.

Speaker 5 (01:11:37):
It's really got to be tough for anybody picking up
those roles in the musical or anyplace else just to
I mean, like you said, this movie made Vincent Cassal
a star. I mean said and Hubert are no slouches either.
All these performances are amazing and to try to hold
the candle to those has to be very difficult.

Speaker 7 (01:11:58):
Well, of course why one reason I think it worked
is that when you're seeing a musical on stage, your
perspective is very different because you're seeing an ensemble, and
they did try and have they were because they used
video projection as well. There were a few moments when
you had some close ups and you could see their faces,

(01:12:22):
but most of the time it was in a place
called Lassene Musical in Paris, which is an enormous concert
hole which usually is used often for any kind of
musical concert. It's enormous, so what you see is an
enormous stage with a lot of people. So what the
musical did was more emphasized the ensemble and the sort

(01:12:46):
of crowd scenes and little groups in so in that sense,
the actors were not trying to compete with the three
actors in Lie because they were not individualized in the
same way as they are in the film.

Speaker 5 (01:13:03):
You mentioned the movie actually being played at the palace
and this kind of political I don't want to say
political theater, but just this political interest in the movie.
So I'm sure by in eighteen eighty six everything was
good and by twenty twenty five everyone's happy in not
ban Leu.

Speaker 7 (01:13:21):
Yes, when the film came out in ninety five, it
was considered to be a revelation. Oh now finally we
know what's wrong with the volo, which of course is ridiculous.
But you have to understand that in Paris. Probably Paris
is very unusual city in that sense of there is

(01:13:42):
a very star division between the city, you know, the
city of light and the beautiful tourist city with all
the monuments and so on, and what the French called
the city antra muros, you know, within the walls. Because
the Peri film around the city, it's like the city

(01:14:03):
is still medieval thought, which is separated from what's outside.
And there's a real division culturally and especially between the
center and the suburb, and recurrently, politicians since the nineteen
sixties are saying, we're going to solve the problem of

(01:14:24):
the volume, and then occasionally a film like that comes
out which they use as an excuse in a way
to say, oh my god, now we know what the
problem is and we're going to solve it, and of
course they don't. And when I was very both amused
and depressed to see that when Lemishrab came out in

(01:14:45):
twenty nineteen, exactly the same thing happened. So in nineteen
ninety five was Jacques Chiracus president, and you know, he
made his ministers watch the film, saying, you know, look
at this, you're going to know what to do. And
then in twenty nineteen when Le miss Arabs came out,
Emandel Macran did the same. At the same time as

(01:15:06):
he didn't do anything to solve it. And so there
is a kind of recurrent failure if you like toss.
Of course, the problems are addressed, but they are enormous.
I mean, you also have to remember that the population
of inner Paris is actually quite small compared to the
massive population outside. Things are trying, the politicians are trying

(01:15:31):
to change things, and in particular, there's a project now
running for a few years and was actually boosted by
the Olympics, which is called the Grand Paris, and the
Grand Paris is trying to break down that division between
inner Paris and the suburbs, but it's very difficult to do.

(01:15:54):
So they're created a lot of new metro lines and
of connections that are trying to to break that that fortification,
if you like. Although the fortification around barriers technically have
gone for you know, they've been gone for a long time,
for a century, they still exist in a way culturally speaking.

(01:16:17):
And what's quite interesting is when you watch films set
in the bolieu which are not like La and We
like more middle class volume people always characters always justifying
why they are in the value. It's like, why would
you not be in Paris, because that's obviously where everybody
wants to be, And so it is a massive social

(01:16:37):
and economic problem. And at the same time as a
film like la And has become it's become a sort
of shorthand to say this is the volue, but you
also have to remember that it represents only part of it.
It represents the more dysfunctional parts of it, which now

(01:16:59):
tends to be have a higher immigrant population, poorer population,
less good habitat and so on. And of course there
are a lot of other suburbs that are not like that,
or even within the same place, as I know, because
some of my family still lives the suburbs of Paris.
You might have some very nice areas with small houses

(01:17:22):
and leafy areas, and then there will be a project,
as in Latin, in another place in the same city.
And so French politicians, especially if they work in the suburbs,
they're often very fed up with the representation of the

(01:17:43):
suburbs always violent as in Latin if you like, where
there's going to be clashes with the police and violence
and riots. So it's it's part is the reality of
some of it, but it's not the entire reality, of course,
But it's the power of that film to have become
the sort of you know, when you talk about the Bonnieux,

(01:18:05):
people think, oh Latin, yes.

Speaker 5 (01:18:08):
Peter Vinson, I'm curious, what are you working on these days?

Speaker 7 (01:18:12):
I think last time I told I spoke to you,
I said the same, But I am truly finishing that.
A book about a French filmmaker called Claude Tolara, who
was made a lot of films in the classic very
well made dramas and costume films in the nineteen forties
and fifties and also the nineteen sixties less successfully, he

(01:18:34):
made a lot of films. He made it more than
forty films. So I'm kind of struggling to contain it,
but I've almost finished, and funnily enough, in my research
I came he made it. One of the films he
made was called in the fifties, it's called The Bon
Dieu san Confession, which is difficult that doesn't have an
English title, but it takes place during the war, and

(01:18:55):
it represents a Jewish character in a fairly racist way.
And I discovered include to left massive archive at the
Swiss Cinematic in Lauwsanne, where I did research for it,
and I found a telegram from chan Pierre Melville which said,
I admire your work, but I'm really disgusted by the

(01:19:15):
way you represented that Jewish character in this film. And
I mean his right, he was right, and I mean
Jopiamdy was Jewish himself, and so but it was quite
a nice bringing of the two together. But anyway, I've
almost finished that, and then I'm writing a little book
for the British Film Institute on Jolie Goda film called

(01:19:38):
Le Mes prix Contempt, which is a film I like
very much, and partly because of Go Down, partly because
of Brigitbado. So I'm kind of be moving into a
very different kind of territory.

Speaker 5 (01:19:50):
I have to tell you, I can't wait to read
both of those. I'm very excited for both of those projects. So, man,
do you have dates in mind or just sometime in
twenty twenty, Yes.

Speaker 7 (01:20:01):
I would say certainly the nah with hoping to give
them manuscript in in April, so that would be I'm
really on the last on his last films, which is
rather difficult because they're they're much less good than some
of them than the ones he made in the forties

(01:20:22):
and fifties. The great film So which he's known then incoding.
One of them, which is one of my favorite terms,
is called La traversee de Paris and sort of crossing Paris,
but sometimes it was called it's nineteen fifty six film,
and it was called Pig across Paris because two characters
it's like two men in Paris and one of them

(01:20:43):
is Jean Gappa and the other one is Bourville and
they transport black market pork the city at night. So
it's a very dark comedy. It's very very good, and
that is one of Outla's best films. But so yeah,
so he made some great films, but the end of

(01:21:03):
his career is, you know, is not so good. So
I still have to talk about every film.

Speaker 5 (01:21:08):
So well, I hope we can have you back next
year and have you talk about both of those movies.
We'll talk about the filmmaker and maybe talk about park
Over Parents and then let me pre Yeah, I would
love to and let you know.

Speaker 7 (01:21:23):
And it's thank you for very nice talking to you anyways.

Speaker 5 (01:21:27):
It is always such a pleasure. I really appreciate you.

Speaker 7 (01:21:30):
You're welcome. Thank you very much.

Speaker 5 (01:21:49):
Oh all right, we are back, and we were talking
about l En going back to the Astrask character. The

(01:22:10):
other thing I found interesting about that too, is that
there's that screen in his apartment where it's the old
lady who's yelling at him, and I can only assume
that that's his mother yelling like what are you doing
bringing all these strange people into the house kind of thing.

Speaker 8 (01:22:27):
The concierge, just another woman who's an obstacle, right.

Speaker 11 (01:22:30):
I know, yeah, and older woman really except for I
don't think that his grandmother is though horrible, but.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
The women are you never see except for the sisters.
You never see women of equivalent age to did the
three main characters. I don't think.

Speaker 5 (01:22:51):
Yeah, And I screwed up before I said that we
saw Sayed's house and his sister or mother Auntie Sewing,
but that was Hubert's so I apologize for that. So yeah,
to your point from earlier, Lou, I don't think we
ever do get to see Said's place.

Speaker 8 (01:23:06):
We see thing going with his brother and sisters. His
sister is like out with her friends and he's like,
you need to go back home, and I'm like a great, yeah, Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:23:14):
Could we talk about the rooftop. There's something about it
that's so powerful, and yet it becomes completely decimated as
soon as the police show up. But it's very much
like the point of turveillent on the entire neighborhood. To
be able to look down and watch in a way
that they at the power they never really have in

(01:23:35):
their everyday experience. And at the same time, there are
the Ubert is an insider because they say he lives
in the building, but Sayid is screamed at for a
for grabbing a hot dog and kicked out of the
space basically, but that's also a very I'm sorry I
keep going back to this word, but it's a very
utopian space that has destroyed utopian because it gives them

(01:23:59):
advantage point that they otherwise do not have on what
surrounds them, not only in terms of their compatriots in
the CTA, but also in terms of what the police
are doing. Gives them a vantage point from which to
anticipate what the police are going to going to do next.
I found that scene very beautiful and very and very moving.
It's the same at the same time.

Speaker 8 (01:24:20):
Right, Yeah, it's a heterotopia, right, because the rules of
order are reversed, right. They're during the surveillance, like you say, yeah,
we do get these brief moments of pleasure and bonding
in the rooftop and on in the park when they're
up high, and it's also a heterotopia because they can
see the skinheads down below and yell at them. And
also during the most famous scene for me is the

(01:24:43):
Nicla police scene where the DJ is playing and the
camera sort of its sores above the scene and it's
really making the ct beautiful from this angle above the rooftops,
and it's sort of briefly trying to gesture at there's
longing for escape, but it never really fulfills that desire,
and it also seems to be throughout the film we

(01:25:04):
hear police helicopters over the city, but Lasovitz puts his
camera on a helicopter and it's like he's trying to
outline like a briff free or a perimeter of space,
of protected space for this moment. But again, it doesn't
last long. Nothing pleasurable, less long.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
I have to land. Yeah, the helicopic song.

Speaker 8 (01:25:24):
As well, Like it's just it's awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:25:27):
Yeah to mix, I don't remember who does boo that's
the sound of the police, that one with Edith Piare.
I mean, that's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:25:35):
Yeah, that's amazing, that's fabulous, And I.

Speaker 5 (01:25:38):
Forgot about that. The scene too where the Said and
Hubert are eventually captured by the cops after the whole
Astis incident, and we don't I don't think we see
Vin's run away, but we kind of cut back to
them and it's just the two of them, and they're
being basically tortured at the police station, meanings slapped around

(01:25:59):
and threatened and just you know, kind of reminds me
of any interaction I've had with police before. So I'm
kind of in that at CAB school of thought myself.
I'm not out hunting them like Vince is. Kind of
again with that posturing, and what does he do. He
goes hides out at the movies, you know. I mean,
you could probably possibly say, because there is a somebody

(01:26:19):
who is wearing a T shirt that says Elvis shot JFK,
you could possibly say he's doing the Lee Harvey Oswald
by hanging out at the movie theater while he's running away.
But I think it's more of him just like fueling
his his masculinity in this whole idea of like the
posturing that we've been talking about, because it feels like
he's fueled by movies. It feels like he would love

(01:26:40):
to just pop in and go watch the Paulma's Scarface.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
You know.

Speaker 5 (01:26:44):
It feels like he's one of those kids that just
is like, oh yeah, I'm gonna take these monologues from
the movies and make them my own and just you know,
have the the Travis Pickle moment, have the say hello
to my little friend moment, you know, just yeah, the
Tony Montana type of things. That just feels like Vin's
in a nutshell to me.

Speaker 1 (01:27:02):
It's very imaginary. Everything that appeals to him is it's
never in terms of the grounded everyday life. It's always
in it. He adopts it into his everyday life. That
it's a total scam in some ways because he can
never really deliver on it.

Speaker 8 (01:27:17):
The torture sequence, intercut with the movie watching sequence, is
sort of interesting in that it really betrays, it really
shows the Kassovitz's investment in in fact showing whiteness, and
not in a critical way, but in privileging the perspectives
of white men. Specifically because in both the sequences, in
the torture sequence and in the cinema sequence, the camera

(01:27:40):
remains so fixed on the eyes of white men, they
receive the central framing of full human subjects Vince as
he absorbs the film, and in the police station we
hover around the face of a white rookie cop who's
watching not a screen but the abuse of a bird
and a black young man and the camera's fixed to
just behind him as the cops demonstrate how to torture

(01:28:03):
and humiliate Said with sexism and with racism and with
real physical contact, And like, why do we never see
from the perspective of Said or Ubert? Why is it
important for us to remain locked in the rookie's perspective.
I mean, we can ask this question and we can
try to answer it, but regardless, the film really performs
an active exclusion by denying as ubera INSIGHT's perspectives, and

(01:28:25):
it just serves to align us with white men again
as always.

Speaker 5 (01:28:29):
I'm really surprised we haven't talked about Abdel, who is
the figure that we see throughout this entire film who
was tortured by the cops and they try to visit
him in the hospital. At one point we see a
shot at the beginning of him. We see a shot
when they go to visit that guy who's wearing that
Elvis shot JFK T shirt. It looks like he's some

(01:28:51):
sort of a fence because he's got all of these
boxes in his apartment. I'm thinking that they're VCRs or
whatever it is that would be good stolen goods. At
the time, that we see that there as well. We
see him. I mean that amazing shot when they were
just waiting at the train station. It looks like they're
waiting to go back to their home base. But we

(01:29:12):
get that massive screen made of little screens and they're
all watching that, and that's when they learned that Abdel
has died. That's the thing that's hanging over this film
so much. You and you mentioned do the right thing
like that for me is the okay, you know, now,
shit just got real after his death is kind of
the Mookie throws the trash can type of moment. It's like, oh,

(01:29:35):
we now are set on a new path. We have
to get this vengeance of some sort. And of course
it's empty. They don't do that at all, and if anything,
Vince gets shot.

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:29:46):
But also like Abdel has never seen alive or heard from, right,
He's a symbol, not a human. And Vince he really
replaces Abdel in the narrative, right, it's Vince's death that
needs revenging at the end. And I think Vince is
really the Radio Rahem character. In another way, it's a
way of asserting the primacy of the white Jewish male.

Speaker 5 (01:30:08):
That's really smart and especially like you're saying with the ring,
and that really does tie him to that radio Raheem character,
who is interesting that he's kind of that that that
character from Knight of the Hunter. You know, he's got
the love and hate rings instead of the tattoos on
his hands. So yeah, it's funny how these are all
speaking to each other.

Speaker 1 (01:30:28):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:30:28):
There is no original gender, right, there is no original
masculine form. Right, It's just an imitation of an imitation.
And the problem is like the more you want an
authentic gender, the more you have to go looking for it,
and the less you're the less authentic you feel. You know.
It's it's interesting and.

Speaker 5 (01:30:45):
It is funny too that they're at the train station
and they were trying to catch the train, and so
suddenly it becomes they're the they're the guys who are
running with their pants around their ankles, unable to hop
on that.

Speaker 8 (01:30:57):
Train, right, and they don't have our character trying to
grab anyone's hand right there exactly.

Speaker 5 (01:31:02):
Yeah, Yeah, they were on their own at that point.
That's when they finally get reunited with Vin's.

Speaker 1 (01:31:07):
Lind magically reappeaters at the station. I mean, I don't
think they ever said, all, let's meet up at the
train station, And of course it's a logical place because
that's where they would get the trend to go home.

Speaker 5 (01:31:18):
But and that whole scene where they're trying to hot
wire the car and that that drunk is fantastic. I
love that drunk.

Speaker 8 (01:31:26):
Yes, yeah, I am upset. Okay, side note, I'm obsessed
with Titan, and his character in Titan is my favorite
film dad of all time. And I was watching Latin
and I was like Vincent Linden and I was like, no, no, no,
he would have been too famous in ninety five. He
wouldn't have done this film. And then we hear on
the commentary that like he just really wanted to be
in this film and drunk on this night in the street,

(01:31:47):
and he was like, great, son, he's so good.

Speaker 1 (01:31:50):
I love him too, He's really he's great. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:31:53):
I mean it is just a comedy of errors, and
I love when he's there just you know, taking the
not necessarily taking a bullet, but you know, being that
that stopper for the police to allow the three friends
to escape from that.

Speaker 8 (01:32:08):
Earlier you mentioned Edith Piaff, and I came across this
really interesting essay by David Peterson, who argued that Classivitz's
very stylized approach to realism and his representation of social
tension is best understood as a reference to thirties French
poetic realism, so films like Pepello Moco and films that

(01:32:30):
star Jean Gabba. And one of the ways that he
argues this is that poetic realist films of the thirties
often use chanson rists with these like working class ballads
to convey emotion, and Peterson argues that the rap and
the soul songs in Latin Like serve the same function
to express experiences of like urban working class life and

(01:32:52):
to create a sense of community. But of course Latin
also incorporates one of the most famous chanson realists of
all time, which is the Edith pf song used in
the film. But that song was apparently once used to
signify a lack of regret about the violence of the
Algerian War and about the French colonial enterprise generally, and

(01:33:14):
so it's really interesting that in Kassiwitz's film, the generations
of French citizens descended from France's former colonies suggest that
they have no regrets about violent street action, right. And
I think it kind of points to the irony too
of like France as a country that really brides itself
on revolution, right, and the riots can be understood as

(01:33:34):
a form of revolution, but of course it's not. It
doesn't count. It can't be glorified if it's done by
these racialized others in the margins, right. And yeah, it's
it was really interesting. I loved this essay, was sid
I just googled it. I think it was on JS store. Yeah,
I can send you then.

Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
I'll find it. I know David Peterson, he does really
good good things. Yeah, I mean, no one, It's not
like I talk to him all the time, but I've
met him.

Speaker 8 (01:33:59):
Well tell him, I'm a f if you do.

Speaker 5 (01:34:01):
Going back to all the way back to that reflective thing,
and I was talking about the reflection of the earth.
I think that's from that that billboard that they see.
And I want to say it's a few times, but
it's definitely towards the end when they're in Paris and
they say, what does it The world belongs? The world
is yours and yours and siety changes it to the

(01:34:22):
world as ours. And I thought that was really nice.
And I think that's where that that earth reflection comes from, right.

Speaker 8 (01:34:29):
And of course it's a scarface reference as well. But
also in metis also known as cafeole Becass if it's
his first feature. It also opens with the image of
the world, and we hear sort of different like radio
frequencies in different languages as the camera kind of traverses
the globe. And I think, to me, that really speaks
to the idea that class if it's really wants to

(01:34:51):
be making a political message. But he just lacks any
kind of real grasp of history, any kind of acknowledgment
of his own misogyny. Maybe he just lacks contextualization that
would give his films a real political punch.

Speaker 5 (01:35:05):
The only time that Vince is successful shooting someone is
in his fantasies, when he's fantasizing at the train station
about shooting those cops, holding his fingers up like guns
and blasting that pop through the window. And again it's
Hubert that comes up and smacks him in the back
of the head. It's just like, don't do that.

Speaker 8 (01:35:26):
Yeah, the use of finger guns is it's an interesting
way that the film talks about the way that these
men are infantilized, right, they're excluded from the roof. When
the cops come, they have to go down to the playground,
and there's that excellent scene. Really one of the only
moments in the film where the film critiques stereotyped, biased,
sensationalized media representation of the Banlu is when these reporters

(01:35:47):
drive by and they look down at the playground and
they're asking these boys questions and Ubert is like, we're
not TYOHI right, We're not a safari park. And it's
the film really critiquing the way that these young men
are presented as savages in mainstream media. And that was
such a beautiful moment, and it's one of the only
times I think there is real direct critique in the film.

Speaker 1 (01:36:09):
But yeah, the.

Speaker 8 (01:36:10):
Finger guns, it's a childlike gesture. But then in the
cinema we also see a kid watching Vince watching Vonce
do his finger guns. And it's so funny because it's
a moment where the film feels really conservative. It's like, oh,
these kids are watching each other. You know, they're going
to grow up to be violent. But I mean that
is kind of the message of the film, right, And
it was an interesting inclusion.

Speaker 5 (01:36:31):
I thought, yeah, which again reminds me of Taxi Driver,
the way that Travis is sitting there watching that movie
and then that will start like doing the finger guns
at the movie screen. I mean, that is so Squoressi
as well.

Speaker 8 (01:36:44):
And to speak about Taxi Driver, we should talk about
Jennie Foster right, who apparently saw La n Yes right
and thought the Americans need to see this, and she
got it distributed in the US and she was like
this huge promoter of the film, which is just a
nice touch.

Speaker 1 (01:36:59):
It is, yeah, a knife connection, that's for sure.

Speaker 8 (01:37:03):
I've been doing a little programming lately and I stumbled
across this film that I would really love to show
with Lain and it's Alistyap's short documentary Toward Tenderness. It
swims in the same themes as Latin, but it takes
a very different approach. And so she's sort of she
and her sister, who's a social worker, sort of like

(01:37:24):
go out into a bandu and they interview young men
and they sort of build empathy with them, build the
viewers empathy with these men by asking them very gently
and without judgment, whether they have the relationships that they
want and what's preventing them from having these relationships. And
the film ends by showing examples of love and connection

(01:37:45):
in the Banvu. And so I think it's it would
be really important companion to let end because it asked these,
it asks men directly, like why can't you communicate with women?
Idn't want to show them together?

Speaker 1 (01:37:58):
That'd be very interesting. I haven't seen that a month.

Speaker 5 (01:38:01):
No, it sounds fascinating, and yeah, that's so much the
problem here, you know. And also just no women to
talk to. Like I said, they're not on the streets.
They're just hiding out someplace, or they're either at art
galleries or at home sewing and.

Speaker 1 (01:38:18):
Waiting for the damn green pepper you booms, red naughty bear.
I think it's yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:38:27):
He's afraid of his grandma's wrath, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:38:29):
And gosh, what a bourgeois art show that they're going to.
I mean, the all of the art that is on
the wall, it's all stark white canvases with things basically
nailed to it, so like it looks like a little
puppy dog or something. And there's the three or four
water bottles that are painted white that are nailed to
the or glued onto this canvas. I'm just like, all right,

(01:38:51):
this is your your showing your opinion of modern art.
It's I understand.

Speaker 8 (01:38:57):
And to have your dad be the gallery owner who's
who just like shrugs complacently and he's just like the
Malleys of the.

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
Bum I think I love it nice.

Speaker 8 (01:39:06):
Yeah, And it goes back to what you were saying
about surreality in the in the city.

Speaker 5 (01:39:11):
All right, We're going to take a break and play
a preview for next week's show. Right after these brief messages.

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
Your ticket for the funniest movie of the year, Airplane Too,
the sequel I got smoking, not smoking first place coach economy.

Speaker 8 (01:39:24):
Airplane Too give you more.

Speaker 5 (01:39:28):
More action and more romance.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):
The word is out. Airplane To the sequel, rated PG.

Speaker 5 (01:39:40):
Now playing at these fine theaters. That's right. We are
shifting gears quite a bit, and we'll be discussing Airplane
to the sequel next week. Until then, I want to
thank my co host Judith and Lou. So, Lou, what
is the latest with you? Oh?

Speaker 8 (01:39:55):
I just wrote an essay on trans feminism and the
new wave of feminist body horror, which was just published
in Siney Access, which is an academic journal that you
can access for free online, and I mostly focused on
the finish the Finnish film Hatching, which I really recommend,
So anyone who likes body horror that's of interest maybe.
I've also just curated a program of shorts of short

(01:40:17):
films about ghosts for the Queer East Festival, which celebrates
queer films from East and Southeast Asia. So I'll get
to present my program in London in May and it'll
travel around the UK and autumn and after that. I'm
really excited about doing two writing collaborations, one on Theo
Montoya's film on Hill sixty nine and another on Jane

(01:40:40):
Showen Brune's Instant Cult to Hit I saw the TV Glow,
both of which I'm so excited about. So that's that's
the rest of my year.

Speaker 5 (01:40:49):
I would love to hear what you have to say
about I saw the TV Glow, because I will admit
when I saw it the first time, the messages just
right over my head. I just completely was not getting it.
I would love to hear your interpretation of that.

Speaker 8 (01:41:03):
Have me and MAXI, my colleague on we've both written
about the film. We're a delight. I don't know I
don't know what to say, but like, yeah, we would
love to talk to you about that. And Maxi's a
real cheat.

Speaker 5 (01:41:13):
Yeah, no, let's let's definitely do it.

Speaker 8 (01:41:15):
No, I just feel like a projection booth audience film
like it would make sense for this.

Speaker 5 (01:41:19):
Totally agree. Yeah, that's great. And Judith, what's going on
with you?

Speaker 1 (01:41:24):
Well, I'm getting ready to go to the Society for
Cinema Media Studies conference in Chicago in three weeks, two weeks,
two and a half weeks, and I'm getting a paper
on It's a panel on movie theaters, and I'm getting
a paper on the cinema Normandhi, which was one of
the well it literally just closed last year, which is

(01:41:47):
really sad. But as you know, the period that I'm
I've been focusing on for way too many years in
my life is the occupation and Normandy was one of
the major outlets for occupation films during the during the war,
and it was in the central occupied down of the

(01:42:07):
city on the Chanzel d And so I am talking
about how the movie theater that was used as a
kind of stage for a number of collaborationist fantasies during
the during the war. Everything that happened at the Cinema
normal Dy was covered in collaborationist movie magazines. That's an

(01:42:29):
interesting It was one of the first. Oh no, it
wasn't one of the first, but it was one of
the big so called atmospheric movie theaters in the city
where it was. It was called Thenonde after the famous boat,
and it was meant to evoke the feeling of being
on a vacation on a courseboat. And the main room,
which I cannot believe I never saw because by the

(01:42:52):
time I lived in Paris, which was many, many years ago,
the Cinema Normandy had been divided into individual theaters. Than
any film I went to see at the Normandy was
when one of those postage samp sized theaters. We had
to trod down a whole bunch of stuff. I never
saw the main theater, which it would make me very sad,
but anyhow so I'm talking about the Citema during the war.

Speaker 5 (01:43:14):
Thanks again, folks for being on the show. Thanks to
everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of
me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the
other shows that I work on. They are all available
at Readingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get help some
projection booth take over the world.

Speaker 2 (01:44:00):
I got pull a coup looking like a pull a coup.

Speaker 8 (01:44:13):
Should be christ this.

Speaker 12 (01:44:15):
Chatrist this, Christie elstrict, this brist Christie bris this, Christies
away boo.

Speaker 3 (01:44:33):
That's the sound that I.

Speaker 8 (01:44:36):
Look pull a coup woo.

Speaker 2 (01:44:38):
That's the sound that I want. The pullycup bo.

Speaker 1 (01:44:43):
That's the sound that I.

Speaker 2 (01:44:45):
Pull a cup. That's the sound that I want. Got
pully compos.

Speaker 3 (01:44:56):
Could be christ this, look, I forget this, this this
man this, that's the sound that I want, Just the

(01:45:26):
sound that I want. Compon that's the sound that I want,
Just the sound that I want.

Speaker 2 (01:45:38):
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Episode 739: La Haine (1995)

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