Paris in La Haine
Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine is, famously, a banlieue-set film, but almost half of the action takes place in Paris. This post is an attempt to map the Paris exteriors shown in the film.
Fifty minutes in the three protagonists take a train from Chanteloup-Les-Vignes to Paris, arriving we assume at the Gare Saint Lazare, though the first view given of Paris shows the three on other side of the city, on the mezzanine in front of the Tour Montparnasse, looking down the Rue de Rennes towards Saint Germain des Prés:
After a conversation in the toilets they are next asking for directions on the Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, heading from the Place d'Iena. That is a statue of Washington in the distance:
Asterix lives at 23 Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie:
As they leave Hubert and Saïd are arrested and taken to a police station, shown only as an interior. On the wall is a map of Paris, one of two maps in the film:
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In the meantime Vinz goes to a boxing match in a hall shown only from inside.
Perhaps it is the Gymnase Jean Jaurès, the location given on a poster for a different match seen earlier in the film. |
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The boxing scene is followed by a view of the Rue Réaumur, with a car heading at high speed towards the junction with the Rue du Temple. Then the car is filmed from the front driving along the Rue du Temple towards the junction with the Rue de Turbigo, into which it turns. Vinz is in the car with the friends he met at the boxing match.
They are then out of the car on the Rue au Maire, outside the Tango nightclub at no. 13. The sequence started with the car very close to this location, but they couldn't reach it directly because of the one-way streets. This journey is, then, a topographically correct negotiation of the one-way system.
The next scene shows Saïd and Hubert at the Gare Saint Lazare, running for and missing the last train home. Vinz joins them here.
This last shot is mimicked in Jeunet's Amélie, where three young men walk towards the camera, though this is the Gare de l'Est rather than the Gare Saint Lazare:
The last incident in Paris is the encounter with a group of skinheads, whom the protagonists run into as they turn from the Rue Debelleyme into the Rue de Poitou:
The courtyard where Vinz threatens to kill the skinhead played by Mathieu Kassovitz is, I think at 24 Rue de Poitou.