Mathieu Kassovitz

“He” (Guillaume Canet) has hit rock bottom. This Parisian musician short on inspiration leaves his wife and kids high and dry to go recharge his batteries in an isolated and mysterious house which creaks with age and perhaps the weight of the past, and which sits on the edge of a cliff. Borrowing heavily from the codes of fantastic film, the movie’s mise en scène encourages us to believe that “Lui”/He isn’t there by chance and that He isn’t entirely at peace with himself, either. By way of this retreat, he’s running away from his professional responsibilities just as much as his personal duties, towards his wife as well as his mistress. There’s undoubtedly something which he needs to exorcise, but what? Incongruous visitors soon make an appearance to offer up the beginnings of an answer to this question.Read More »

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—Jewish, African, and Arab, respectively—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of 1990s French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.Read More »

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Set in France at the end of World War II Albert Dehousse finds out his father wasn’t a war hero and his mother is a collaborator. He leaves his wife and goes to Paris. Gradually he inveigles himself with the resistance movement. They trust him and he helps them trace collaborators.Read More »

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Jacques Audiard made his directorial debut in a spectacular fashion with Regarde les hommes tomber, one of the most visually striking and disturbing French thrillers of the 1990s. The son of the acclaimed French screenwriter Michel Audiard, he had scripted several films (going back to the mid-1970s) before he gravitated to the role of director and pretty well redefined the French film noir with this and his subsequent thriller offerings – Sur mes lèvres (2001), De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005) and, of course, the stunning Un prophète (2009). Those aspects which most characterise Audiard’s distinctive brand of cinema – the nihilistic bleakness, the fragmented narrative, the assortment of fragile outcasts living on the abyss – are present in his first film, an idiosyncratic study in solitude and friendship.Read More »