La Haine (Asian Dub Foundation Version) at the Sydney Opera House, 30/05/2026

Lucy Horton reviews …

Big night for teen broey sensibilities––the arbiters of which were there in spirit but probably the sparsest demographic in the Playhouse Theatre: a fairly older crowd with a solid slice of twenty-somethings. 

Though I agreed with resident La Haine expert Avia that the trio’s being young, angry men was necessary to drive acutely the film’s message ––the circularity of hate–– I did feel as though at the end of my ragebaited rope by about three-quarters of the way through. Over the course of a day and a night, how many people can you actually piss off? 

A young man, Abdel, is critically injured in police custody. The film tracks the next twenty hours in the lives of his three friends and the riots that ensue across the banlieues (outer Parisian suburbs). 

The costumes were awesome and enviable. If I didn’t study it for that, I’d love to have looked at it for French in school. But it was a pretty great time to see it, at the denouement of my Religious Studies major: a Jewish, Muslim, and Christian triptych of young, immigrant masculinity … but it wasn’t just that, really. At all. Their maleness is so salient it actually becomes at times, like the downtempo electronica of Asian Dub Foundation, white noise. And, the clarity with which the French memory would have you hold things––secularism or postcolonial liberation, fiercely fought for or definitively won––dissolves in postmodern time, undone by both its imaginaries (the brutality of the state) and the less-neatly-confined imagined (the Maghrebi ambiance of immigrant France and the legacy of late-twentieth-century Jewish and pied-noir countercultural disaffection).

I did like how Vinz’s, Hubert’s, and Saïd’s crystally different approaches, to getting out of the projects, broke down by the end in a kind of osmosis: pacifism going trigger-happy, and the pugnacious getting cold feet. Avia told me about La Haine’s inadvertent black-and-whiteness, which was brilliant to witness on a big screen. Set to Asian Dub Foundation’s trip-hop-meets-reggae, scenes like Hubert in the boxing gym, the trio watching the news break in the shopping mall, and the slow-mo breakdance montage (Vinz’s Hava Nagila dance a spectacular sonic anomaly), made for a hypnotic experience à la the visual sensation of fire in grayscale. 

What’s there to do? As we filtered out to the foreshore on Winter’s eve in Sydney, I wondered if we all felt akin to Vincent Cassel in his perfect Nike windbreaker and leather overcoat traipsing, head-down, through the banlieues (not that we could, really––Vivid crowds and all). Cops continue to gallivant and instigate just as they were doing in the outer suburbs of Paris in the nineties. Rooftop barbecue on Fisher Library? Jusqu’ici tout va bien …