La Haine/ The Dreamers aka Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien"

One of those things. Today I had the tune of "Ava Maria" (Bach's version, I believe) running through my head the whole morning and driving me absolutely nuts. Why do the weirdest songs run through people's minds and refuse to leave?? There must be some (as there is in most things) psychoanalytic value in this - someone should write a thesis on Why Songs Get Stuck in Your Head and Drive You Nuts.

Then, blessedly, I receieved an e-mail a few hours ago which mentioned "Non, je ne regrette rien", albeit in a non-music context, but which of course instantly brought up echoes of the Edith Piaf version. Begone, Ava Maria. Thank heavens.

Me being me, I remember most things in relation to films, and, in the case of "Non, je ne regrette rien": The Dreamers and La Haine, which made me look up what I wrote about them a few months back. I'm actually really surprised how I used to find the time to blog all that - I hardly have time these days to do anything but the bare essential writing and reading, and sometimes not even that. But hey, it's good to be busy, right?

La Haine (first posted 12 June 2005)

I seldom watch films twice. Someone once estimated that if you were to spend every month of leave in 4 countries (a week per country, which is scant) for all 50 years of one's working life, you would only just about be able to visit every country in the world once. There is no time for return visits. The same principle applies to movies. There are so many to watch that I have frankly time enough for only one viewing. Some might object this is simply mindlessly favouring quantity over quality (what's the point of whizzing from one film to the next without enjoying, savouring them?). Well, so be it - though in my typical Singapore-inspired I-want-it-all-Tony-Roma-combo-plate style, I do try to watch it once and get it right and enjoy it and remember it.

I watched La Haine twice - once last night and once this morning. Mathiew Kassovitz's La Haine, of course, is a well-known film, famous for its sociological depiction of the peripheral Parisian neighbourhoods - the banlieue - much like (though in a different way) Pasolini's Accattone of the Roman borgate - both films where graffiti messages are significant (and a loss if one does not understand the language or vernacular). To give you an idea, the film, whose premise is a case of police brutality, begins with archival and mock-documentary images of rioting and street protest, to the soundtrack of Bob Marley's "Burnin' and Lootin'". Enough said. But that does not explain the arrest of my interest to warrant the second viewing (puns not intended!).

Actually, I can't quite explain why I decided to watch La Haine again. Maybe because it is a genuinely well-made film (but then I watch about a dozen genuinely well-made films a week - it's not quite so startling after a while). Maybe because the three central characters - alienated, disenfranchised ("Sylvester's a black brother"), immigrant - struck a chord, myself a stranger in a strange land, screwed over time and time again by the stupid Home Office and its excessive, ridiculous laws, implemented at will and whim. Maybe because the protest against oppression and brutality in the film contrasted so starkly to my homeland, with its suppressed, repressed calm held together only by a terror of being left behind in global competition ("la monde est a v/nous"), so that even the unions belonged to the government. Maybe because I still have so much hate in me (La haine means hate) and the film tells me (not that I don't know this) hatred is pointless and self-defeating - but some things are impossible to forgive, y'know? (Hubert: "in school we learnt that hate breeds hate." Vinz: "I didn't go to school! I'm from the street! Know what it taught me? Turn the other cheek, you're dead mothafucka!") Yes - fooled once but never again. Maybe because the Parisian banlieue reminded me so astonishingly of Singapore's own housing neighbourhoods - the sterile building blocks, the jowl-to-jowl apartments, the trees planted in neat little rows, the place where people live all squashed on top of each other. Maybe because it reminds me of how Singapore, parading itself with its tourism ads so embarrassingly infantile and rank with pandering exoticism, has become its own Thoiry. Maybe it's because this could very well be a film about Singaporeans ("Look at those sheep in the system. They look cute in their fancy leather jackets. But they're scumbags. They ride escalators carried by the system...They can't move without escalators"). Maybe because it has the ghosts of so many other films: "you talkin' to me" Taxi Driver, boxing-out-of-poverty Rocco and His Brothers. Maybe because it has the same crazy Tarantinoian humour which really cracks me up - a bullet, after all the bravado in waving around the stolen gun, "put to good use" in hotwiring a car nobody knows how to drive; after the shooting of a cop, diving into the getaway car to find it has stalled. Maybe because that amazing helicopter shot, travelling over the treetops to Piaf's "Je ne regrette rien" tweaked to breakbeat and interpolated "fuck the police" rap, reminded me of The Dreamers which depicted another violence in another time, so different yet the same. And maybe that's it: maybe it's because this film achieves that rare thing - straddle dichotomies. That French films are different from American films yet the same. That the violence of 1995 France is different from the violence of 1968 yet the same. That France is different from Singapore yet the same. That people are different yet hate the same. But that people (and here I'm thinking of Bob Marley, whose songs I have heard in places from France in La Haine to boats in Indonesia) protest the same because oppression, wherever you go, is the same. Ergo, that this world is really fucked up yet we continue to live in it - on the way down, we keep telling ourselves, "so far so good" - and, for some of us, continue to feed its injustices.