French Cult Film ‘La Haine’ Returns as Hip-Hop Musical with Tensions Persisting in Poor Suburbs 

Actors perform during a rehearsal of "La Haine" musical show, in Tremblay en France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP) 
Actors perform during a rehearsal of "La Haine" musical show, in Tremblay en France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP) 
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French Cult Film ‘La Haine’ Returns as Hip-Hop Musical with Tensions Persisting in Poor Suburbs 

Actors perform during a rehearsal of "La Haine" musical show, in Tremblay en France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP) 
Actors perform during a rehearsal of "La Haine" musical show, in Tremblay en France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP) 

Watching “La Haine” nearly 30 years ago, there was a sense of something inexorable about violence in the French suburbs.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz’s critically acclaimed black-and-white film opens with video images of news footage of urban riots. The film then follows three friends — Hubert, Vinz and Saïd — over the course of 24 hours in a world of police brutality. It ends with the killing of one of the young men by a police officer.

A confrontation ensues, followed by a voice-over: “It’s about a society in free fall.” A gunshot is heard, leaving little doubt as to the dramatic outcome, with more blood spilled.

The film served as a revelation about the grim reality of life in what the French call the “banlieue” — the deprived suburbs with housing projects — and took the 1995 Cannes Film Festival by storm. Kassovitz won the best director award, and “La Haine” achieved cult status in France and around the world.

Nearly three decades later, it’s still hailed as the reference film on housing projects in crisis. Kassovitz and theater director Serge Denoncourt are giving it new life, turning it into a stage musical that opens in October.

The title remains the same — “La Haine,” which translates as “hate,” but adds a subtitle: “So far, nothing has changed.”

“Two days after we announced the show (last year), we were very hyped,” Kassovitz said. “We were very happy to say: ’OK, we’re going to officially announce it and it’s going to be a beautiful show and it’s going to be a beautiful party and everything. Two days later, we saw the video of Nahel, you know, the kid who got shot by policemen.”

Kassovitz was referring to Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old delivery driver who was fatally shot by a police officer in June 2023, sparking riots across the country and unleashing anger over police violence, poverty and discrimination against people with immigrant backgrounds. Merzouk was of North African origin.

“Yes, we know why we are doing this,” Kassovitz said. “It’s for him. It’s for all the victims that suffered that kind of violence after so many years.”

Love is all you need Despite shooting “La Haine” in black and white, Kassovitz tries to avoid overly simplistic conclusions about the roots of violence.

“We are trying to solve the questions that the movie raised,” he said. “We cannot point fingers all the time. Maybe now it’s time to have solutions. And we think that the solution is love. So, that’s what the show is. It's how to stop hating and start loving.”

To find the trio of actors who would carry this message of love through the musical, Kassovitz and his team traveled across France for months. The director believes that Aliyou Diop, Samy Belkessa and Alexander Ferrario are the right choices to recreate the chemistry from the film.

For all its darkness, the movie already had a dose of good feeling. It's filled with dozens of funny punch lines and jokes that only reinforce the bond and love between the three main protagonists as they venture into the heart of Paris.

“There’s a lot of love in the hood, too” said Diop, who comes from a working-class neighborhood in the port city of Le Havre. “Otherwise, we’d all be shooting at each other. In the movie you see three buddies living in a complicated context, and you forget the context as you watch the film. They manage to make us forget that. That’s why I like them so much. They laugh, they laugh in their misery.”

When Kassovitz made his film, French suburban culture was still largely underground. The local rap music scene had already emerged, but the local mainstream media tended to portray the youth from the housing projects in an unflattering and largely fear-based light.

Kassovitz said that he's pleased that some of the stereotypes have been broken and that suburban youth are now getting a chance to make their way to the top of the charts, like French-Malian pop star Aya Nakamura, who sang at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

For Kassovitz, the difference between the film and the show is that there is no need to warn people that this is about kids from the projects. “Thirty years ago, nobody knew them, so we had to make a movie to introduce them to the French culture,” he said.

Diop, who plays Hubert in the musical and is also a rap artist, impressed the casting team with his stage presence. An essential asset in a musical show that combines dance, cinema, rap, theater and live performance, which Denoncourt hopes will be groundbreaking.

“We’re trying to put things together in an artistic way, but not too, too cute. We like the raw material that we have with the breakdancing, with the rap,” he said. “The show is pretty raw.”



‘Joker 2’ Stumbles at Box Office amid Poor Reviews from Audiences, Critics

Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
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‘Joker 2’ Stumbles at Box Office amid Poor Reviews from Audiences, Critics

Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

“Joker: Folie à Deux” is the No. 1 movie at the box office, but it might not be destined for a happy ending.
In a turn of events that only Arthur Fleck would find funny, the follow-up to Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story about the Batman villain opened in theaters nationwide this weekend to a muted $40 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, less than half that of its predecessor. The collapse was swift and has many in the industry wondering: How did the highly anticipated sequel to an Oscar-winning, billion-dollar film with the same creative team go wrong?
Just three weeks ago, tracking services pegged the movie for a $70 million debut, which would still have been down a fair amount from “Joker’s” record-breaking $96.2 million launch in Oct. 2019. Reviews were mixed out of the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in competition like the first movie and even got a 12-minute standing ovation, The Associated Press reported.
But the homecoming glow was short-lived, and the fragile foundation would crumble in the coming weeks with its Rotten Tomatoes score dropping from 63% at Venice to 33% by its first weekend in theaters. Perhaps even more surprising were the audience reviews: Ticket buyers polled on opening night gave the film a deadly D CinemaScore. Exit polls from PostTrak weren’t any better. It got a meager half star out of five possible.
"That’s a double whammy that’s very difficult to recover from," said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “The biggest issue of all is the reported budget. A $40 or $50 million opening for a less expensive movie would be a solid debut."
“Joker: Folie à Deux” cost at least twice as much as the first film to produce, though reported figures vary at exactly how pricey it was to make. Phillips told Variety that it was less than the reported $200 million; Others have it pegged at $190 million. Warner Bros. released the film in 4,102 locations in North America. About 12.5% of its domestic total came from 415 IMAX screens.
Internationally, it's earned $81.1 million from 25,788 screens, bringing its total global earnings estimate to $121.1 million. In the next two weeks, “Joker 2” will also open in Japan and China.
Second place went to Universal and DreamWorks Animation's “The Wild Robot,” which added $18.7 million in its second weekend, bringing its domestic total to nearly $64 million. Globally, it's made over $100 million. Warner Bros.' “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" took third place in weekend five, Paramount's “Transformers One” landed in fourth and Universal and Blumhouse's “Speak No Evil” rounded out the top five.
The other big new release of the weekend, Lionsgate's “White Bird,” flopped with just $1.5 million from just over 1,000 locations, despite an A+ CinemaScore.
Overall, the weekend is up from the same frame last year, but “Joker's” start is an unwelcome twist for theater owners hoping to narrow the box office deficit.
Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix have said they aspired to make something as “audacious” as the first film. The sequel added Lady Gaga into the fold, as a Joker superfan, and delved further into the mind of Arthur Fleck, imprisoned at Arkham and awaiting trial for the murders he committed in the first. It’s also a musical, with elaborately imagined song and dance numbers to old standards. Gaga even released a companion album called “'Harlequin,” alongside the film.
In his review for The Associated Press, Jake Coyle wrote that “Phillips has followed his very antihero take on the Joker with a very anti-sequel. It combines prison drama, courthouse thriller and musical, and yet turns out remarkably inert given how combustible the original was.”
The sequel has already been the subject of many think pieces, some who posit that the sequel was deliberately alienating fans of the first movie. In cruder terms, it’s been called a “middle finger.” But fans often ignore the advice of critics, especially when it comes to opening their wallets to see revered comic book characters on the big screen.
“They took a swing for the fences,” Dergarabedian said. “But except for a couple of outliers, audiences in 2024 seem to want to know what they’re getting when they’re going to the theater. They want the tried and true, the familiar.”
It has some high-profile defenders too: Francis Ford Coppola, who last week got his own D+ CinemaScore for his pricey, ambitious and divisive film “Megalopolis,” entered the Joker chat with an Instagram post.
“@ToddPhillips films always amaze me and I enjoy them thoroughly,” Coppola wrote. “Ever since the wonderful ‘The Hangover’ he’s always one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect.”
“Megalopolis,” meanwhile, dropped a terminal 74% in its second weekend with just over $1 million, bringing its total just shy of $6.5 million against a $120 million budget.
Deadline editor Anthony D’Alessandro thinks the problem started with the idea to make the Joker sequel a musical. “No fan of the original movie wanted to see a musical sequel,” he wrote on Saturday.
The first film was also divisive and the subject of much discourse, then about whether it might send the wrong message to the wrong type of person. And yet people still flocked to see what the fuss was about. “Joker” went on to pick up 11 Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director, and three wins. It also made over $1 billion and was the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, until this summer when Marvel's “Deadpool & Wolverine" took the crown.