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

Lucy Horton reviews …

Big night for teen bro-ey sensibilities. Coulda been bigger –– their arbiters were there in spirit, but were probably the sparsest demographic in the Playhouse Theatre on Saturday: a fairly older crowd with a solid slice of twenty-somethings. 

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). 

Though I agreed with resident La Haine expert Avia that the trio’s being young, angry men was necessary to drive most 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? 

The costumes were awesome (and enviable). If I didn’t study it for that, I’d loved 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 triptych of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian young masculinity … but it wasn’t just that, really. At all. Their maleness is so salient it actually becomes, like the downtempo electronica of Asian Dub Foundation, something like white noise. And, the clarity with which the French memory would have you hold things––secularism or postcolonial liberation, fiercely fought or definitively won––dissolves in postmodern time, undone by both its imaginaries (the state and its unimaginative intolerance) and the less-neatly-confined imagined … in three immigrant boys wedged (by us, more than themselves) in almost too broad a narrative: France’s Maghrebi ambiance and its mid-century memory of a distinctly Jewish and pied-noir countercultural disaffection. Really wanky take for a really cool movie.

I did like how Vinz’s, Hubert’s, and Saïd’s crystally different approaches to getting out of the projects melted by the end: pacifism goes trigger-happy, and the pugnacious get cold feet. Avia educated me about La Haine’s unintended black-and-whiteness, which was brilliant to see 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––Vivid crowds and all). Cops continue to gallivant and instigate just as they were doing in the outer suburbs of nineties Paris. Rooftop barbecue atop Fisher Library? Jusqu’ici tout va bien …