Kids in the City
Whether it be by coincidence or some sort of filmmaking magic in the air, 1995 saw the release of three distinct films about young people aimlessly wandering cities.
The first of these films to come out was Before Sunrise, a genuinely romantic film about an American man and a French woman who meet on a train in Europe and decide to get off and spend the day roaming Vienna together. The second was Kids, a decidedly unromantic NC-17 film about a teenager in Manhattan looking to tell a boy she slept with that he gave her HIV while he stomps the city with his friends looking for sex and drugs. The final film was La Haine, a black and white French film set in the aftermath of a riot in the Paris projects set off by police brutality.
Despite the vastly different stories each film tells, these movies have a lot in common. All three are, relatively speaking, plotless. (Or at least relative to what we talk about when we usually talk about “plot.”) More specifically, all three use their lack of plot to make a direct point, whether it be a point about living life in the moment like in Before Sunrise or one about directionless youth like in Kids or one about the effects of societal and racial alienation like in La Haine. All three also deal in one way or another with what it means to be young, whether that means seeing the world with hope and optimism or violent political aggression.
However, as you may have gathered from reading those plot descriptions, they also couldn’t be more different from one another if they tried. In some ways, the contrasts are surface level and obvious. After all, these films take place across different countries, continents, and cultures. But more importantly, they involve characters of different races and backgrounds who live up and down the economic ladder, and while some of these films choose to tackle these subjects head on, some have them linger in the background or outright ignore them.
So what can we learn from comparing them? Let’s find out! We’ll be talking about these in the order I arbitrarily felt like watching them. So let’s discuss! Also, let’s enjoy so low quality 90s trailers!
Kids
From pre-school to sixth grade, I went to a small private school in the D.C. suburbs in Virginia. Though it was a private school, and a quality one at that (at least for a time), it wasn’t considered one of the elite institutions in the area, and it didn’t see its students through past middle school. As a result, (along with a few other factors), it wasn’t as expensive or exclusive as the kinds of schools that may flood your imagination when you think “private school.” Thus I got to interact with kids of different races, religions, and economic statuses.
I would eventually finish middle school and high school at a more prestigious school in the city. I loved my high school dearly, but it didn’t have quite the same mix of kids, and I wish with all my heart that I could’ve been more appreciative of my lower school group when I had the chance.
But the moment I stepped foot in that new school, I was immediately appreciative of how close that old school was to my house. Imagine going from a leisurely fifteen minute drive to a brutal hour long nightmare commute through a massive urban hub. On top of that, all my new friends no longer lived in my immediate vicinity, and I felt incredibly isolated from them until I eventually got my license.
I went to a college that’s about a thirty to forty minute train ride from NYC. In the early days, I’d go to the city fairly frequently, and one of the aspects of the city I loved the most struck me the first time I looked at the metro map. There isn’t a whole lot you don’t have easy access to. Now I live in Los Angeles. The public transportation’s getting better. But generally speaking, I have easy access to nothing. Thank god I have a car.
I spent too much of your time saying all this to make a simple point: I can’t help but view New York through incredibly rosy lenses, and Kids hits a very particular nerve with me. It is, after all, a movie about kids of different races and classes who all have access to one another because the city they live in provides them the means to do so. We have lower-middle class kids like Telly, one of the lead characters, and Stephen, whose upper middle-class apartment the kids will eventually wreck at the end of the movie. In the world I spent most of my adolescence, these kids would be kept apart from one another by access to education and basic geographical layout. In this world, these two can be friends.
It’s not only the diversity of kids the kids in Kids have access to (sorry), but also culture itself. The underground hip hop birthed in the city that was harder to access in the rest of the country booms in the background of many scenes, whether it be in the apartments or the public hangout spots. Come nightfall, many of the kids find themselves in NASA, the famous rave thrown every Friday night in The Shelter club in Tribeca. (Though for the movie, it was filmed in The Tunnel, another famous club in Chelsea.) The kids could even create their own cultural hub. The titular kids are, essentially, the skateboarders and their friends who hung out in Washington Square Park.
But here’s the thing about these kids as they’re portrayed in this movie: The culture doesn’t really matter to them. They are not advocates of hip hop or the rave scene, they’re not creating art (apart from maybe the skateboarding), and they’re not trying to broaden their horizons. While they’re in the park, they yell slurs at a passing gay couple, unaware and apathetic to any signs of kinship between the outsider skateboarders and the gay community in New York. All of the city and all of the culture in the world are at their feet, and the only thing they care about is sex and getting fucked up on whatever substance they can find. But mostly sex.
And so the kids roam the city in search of nothing other than momentary physical pleasure, and Telly infects Jennie with HIV before the events of the story. Telly doesn’t know he has it yet, but Jennie finds out early in the movie. What allowed him to contract the disease in the first place? How was Telly able to infect Jennie? Granted, both Telly and Jennie are incredibly young, and may not know better, and we know much less about Jennie’s background than Telly’s. But how could this happen?
The answer, unfortunately, is that the same reason the kids have access to so much is the same reason why they’re able to infect each other. Telly starts the movie in the Upper East Side. (Or at least they filmed the first location in the Upper East Side, according to this article about the filming locations of Kids.) By the end, after having spent the movie zig zagging across Manhattan, they’re in Alphabet City. (About a forty minute train ride south of where we began. And again, whether or not the scene is actually supposed to take place in Alphabet City is unclear. But that’s where they filmed it.) Telly and the kids bring all their baggage with them as they travel the city, just like the founders of hip hop and disco and punk and so many other kinds of New York bred art. In an ideal world, they’d bring the same kind of excitement. But in this movie, it’s how they bring death and disease.
This weaponization of the city is, of course, the point. The 90s and the early 2000s were a high point for cultural alarmists, and this is the era where many a two-bit “political scientist” were splashing spunk all over their degrees with the coinage of the term “superpredator” for delinquent youths. For them, Kids was basically a giant middle finger.
Still, there’s something profoundly heartbreaking about this movie. There’s so much for these kids, and they’ll never know it.
La Haine
In 1986, French junior minister for higher education Alain Devaquet and several of his fellow party members drafted a series of proposals that would eventually be known as the Devaquet Law. From the laws would’ve allowed universities, among other unpopular aspects, to reject more applicants, to differentiate between diplomas depending on the prestige of the school, and to increase tuition. These proposals were, shall we say, unpopular, as mass protests were sparked in Paris and throughout France. During these protests, a 22 year old Franco-Algerian student named Malik Oussekine was beaten to death by riot police. The proposals were eventually withdrawn and Devaquet resigned.
In 1993, a Zairian teenager named Makomé M’Bowole was arrested for allegedly stealing cigarettes from a tobacconist. While in custody, interrogating detective Pascal Compain was supposedly tired of Makomé insulting him, so Pascal pulled out his gun to intimidate the teen and accidentally shot Makomé in the head, killing him instantly.
Mathieu Kassovitz started writing La Haine the day Makomé was shot.
La Haine follows three young men in their twenties who live in the housing projects in the Paris suburbs. Our protagonists are Vinz, a rage filled white Jewish wannabe thug, Hubert, a calm boxer and drug dealer of African decent who wants to leave the projects, and Saïd, a middle eastern man who feels the same amount of vitriol towards authority that Vinz does, but with the cool presence of mind of Hubert. One of their friends, Abdel, was severely beaten in police custody, sparking intense rioting across the projects. In the chaos, a police officer lost his gun. Vinz was the one who found it, and he pledges to use it on a cop if Abdel dies. We then follow the next twenty hours of their lives as they get into arguments with the locals, with the cops, and with each other as they aimlessly walk around Paris.
Racial and economic factors were certainly present in Kids, but they were addressed in a mostly indirect manner. The film doesn’t address the various divides between the white kids and the black kids and any other kids in between because the kids themselves don’t think about these issues much either. (Except for maybe one scene in the public pool.)
(Note: At this point, it should be pointed out that the DVD of La Haine I own may not have the best of translations when it comes to subtitles. Though I remember little of the French classes I attended, I did spot some inaccuracies here and there. And not just simple stuff like the spelling of “Saïd” as “Sayid” or the subtitles saying “Snoopy” instead of “Asterix.” Stuff that’s important in regards to slang and their arguments. So if there’s an incorrect assertion, that might be why.)
Unlike Kids, La Haine confronts these issues directly. Of course, the story begins off screen with a teenager being beaten into a coma by the police for issues that have to do with race and class. But the racial divide between the three friends constantly lingers in the background of their arguments. Most scenes in La Haine end with some sort of confrontation, and more than a few of these confrontations are with the police. Through Vinz is by far the most aggressive of the group, he is never the one arrested. Saïd, on the other hand, is arrested twice throughout the runtime of the movie, and Hubert is arrested once with him. Vinz gets to play the thug. His non-white friends get to suffer the consequences. (That is, of course, until a very specific moment.)
But they’re also present in a less literal sense. Throughout the story, Vinz and Hubert constantly fight about Vinz’s plan to murder a cop if Abdel dies. Vinz rants and raves about the injustices of the system, and how he’s sick of living like an animal. However, though the three are of the same class, Vinz enjoys privileges Hubert and Saïd don’t get to because he’s white. When the other two confront him, they never address that disparity directly. But it’s constantly there, and Hubert and Saïd are aware of it all times.
La Haine also differs from Kids in that all three are acutely aware of the cultural elements of where they live, and unlike Kids, they actually appreciate it. In one of the most memorable scenes in the movie, a DJ sets up his equipment in front of his window and begins to cut. We then get a beautiful aerial shot of the projects as the sound echoes throughout the buildings. Somewhere in it, Vinz and Saïd stand back-to-back, listening to the music, taking the time to appreciate the craft on display.
Not too long later, there’s a scene of Hubert admiring the break dancers in the projects, a style of dancing that had lost most of its popularity in the US by the time the time La Haine was released. But it’s apparently still alive in France, and Hubert still knows talent when he sees it.
There are little details like this throughout the film. One of the earliest scenes shows Saïd painting “Fuck the police” graffiti on an armored truck. Vinz recreates the Taxi Driver mirror scene as we learn in hindsight that he’s mentally preparing himself to shoot a cop. Hubert has a prominent poster in his room of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black power fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Counter culture is ever present in their lives, even in what they wear and what they say.
But, and understandably so, they only appreciate the culture that speaks directly to their experiences. Later in the story, the three friends find themselves stranded in the heart of Paris. They randomly stumble into an art gallery. They don’t think much of the art on display, and it’s clear from the glances directed at the three that nobody wants them there. They then hit on some women and, as usual, an argument ensues. Even the usually calm Hubert destroys some stuff as they’re being thrown out.
All of this speaks to societal divides in Paris culture that one can even see in the physical layout of the city. I don’t have as much knowledge of late 20th century French history as I wish I did, and because of the previously mentioned subtitles issue, there are assuredly some nuances in La Haine that I didn’t and couldn’t catch.
However, the projects in Paris don’t look terribly different from the ones in the United States, particularly in how far they seem to physically be from the city itself, and how Paris and the projects feel like two different worlds. We can even see it in the architecture. The projects, newer big blocky brick and concrete buildings. All utility and no aesthetic. Paris, an old city with some of the most aesthetically pleasing architecture in history where the rich and powerful of France live. Just like in America, one gets a sense that conflict between the two seems inevitable.
Before Sunrise
Before Sunrise is probably, at least by traditional standards, the most pleasant and “watchable” movie I’m talking about in this article. It is also, in the long-run, probably the most prestigious and well-known as well. And yet it’s somehow the outlier.
Before Sunrise doesn’t have a confrontational political subtext. Jesse and Céline, protagonists who meet on a train and decide to spend the day walking around Vienna together, occasionally speak of broken political systems and the differences between men and women. But their story doesn’t exist to address those systems or offer insight into how to fix the many rifts between the sexes. It doesn’t address race or poverty. It is simply an incredibly tender hangout movie about two people talking to one another.
So the differences tend to stand out, and one of the more obvious ones to me is Before Sunrise’s relationship with the culture of Vienna. Jesse and Céline want to take in every last drop, and Vienna seems more than happy to provide.
Early in the movie, they stop two guys on a bridge and they end up telling Jesse and Céline about an avant-garde-ish play they’re both in about a cow. One tram ride later and they’re in a record store with actual listening booths. Though the resurgence of vinyl makes this scene a little less remarkable (at least if you’re trying to make a point about available access to art in a movie), I live close to Amoeba Music, one of the most famous record stores in the country, and they don’t even have listening booths. They go to a fair and ride the Wiener Riesenrad, the ferris wheel you may recognize from The Third Man or The Living Daylights. They have their fortunes read while sitting outside in a cafe. A man on the street writes them a poem. They go to a grunge ass grunge bar. The list goes on and on.
Granted, this may not be the actual experience one would have if they randomly started walking around Vienna. Director and co-writer of Before Sunrise Richard Linklater is a filmmaker obsessed with the joys of taking in as much culture and experience as possible, so one could argue that these are obviously the aspects of the city he wants to highlight. However, it stands out when the kids of Kids have next to no appreciation for culture save for maybe skateboarding and our three protagonists in La Haine only appreciate art that aligns with their worldview. Bountiful expression exists in both of these movies, but it’s only appreciated through very limited circumstances.
Jesse has an idea for a TV show about documenting a different person’s life everyday for twenty four hours. Céline thinks the idea is kind of dumb. Céline is eager to have her palm read by the fortune teller at the restaurant. Jesse goes out of his way to call the fortune teller a scam artist and a thief. He also goes out of his way to criticize the street poet, insisting that he wrote that poem before he met them and maybe filled in a noun or two. They don’t end up going to the cow play, but at least to me, they didn’t seem opposed to the idea of doing so. At daybreak, they both want to stop and listen to the harpsichord player.
They occasionally have differing opinions on the cultural experiences they have during their night together, but unlike the characters in the previous films, at least they’re open to having them. (Okay, maybe Jesse was a little less open to the fortune teller.) Part of the reason the film feels so romantic, after all, is because they’re both so open to spontaneousness and the world around them.
However, two important distinctions need to be made. The first is that Jesse and Céline clearly have a higher education than that of any of the characters in the previous movies, which most likely means they’re both a bit higher on the economic ladder. Furthermore, Jesse and Céline are deliberately framed as two open people in a movie specifically about people taking in culture. It’s not that the characters in the other films can’t appreciate art or music the same way that Jesse and Céline do, or that the art they appreciate is somehow “less than.” I, personally, love the smoked out hip hop of Kids as much as the weird folk music and the Daniel Johnston tracks and the DJ and breakdancing scenes in La Haine are incredible. They just happen to be constructs in a much different story than the one of Jesse and Céline.
The second distinction is much more simple: Unlike the other characters, Jesse and Céline are tourists. Jesse’s never stepped foot in Vienna before and Céline has visited the city once or twice, but generally doesn’t know her way around. We the audience can easily fall under the spell of the city because we’re experiencing it through the eyes of outsiders. (At least if you’re like me, and you’ve never been to Vienna before.)
Céline grew up in Europe, so she’s not as awed by the architecture and the layout of the city as Jesse is a lot of the time. But Jesse is from America, like myself. He’s from the land of endless strip malls and urban space so profoundly pointless that it’ll send you into a depression. Early in the film, as they walk on the bridge that they’ll meet the actors on, Jesse comments, “This is a nice bridge.” Granted, the line is meant to convey the awkwardness of these two people impulsively spending the day together. But it’s a line that always stood out to me because yes, it is a nice bridge. When I came home from my first time in Europe, I remember looking out the window, seeing the monstrous office buildings littered across the Beltway and feeling a deep sarcastic sadness. I can appreciate a simple old wooden bridge.
A little later, we cut from them listening to Kath Bloom’s “Come Here” in the listening booth to the two walking around Maria-Theresien-Platz, a public square in Vienna. The song plays as Jesse is enraptured. “Look at this. This is beautiful.” It’s one of the only moments in all three of these movies about wandering old cities where a character stops and actually appreciates where he’s standing.
The question I wish I could answer is “Why did these movies come out specifically in 1995?” Ultimately, I think there are too many complexities. We’d have to take in the three cities and two continent’s histories and political contexts, and I’m simply unqualified to do that.
However, all three of these films are about youth, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three were made by filmmakers like Linklater and Harmony Korine and others who were leading a new independent movement in film. It’s hard to be young in an institution that’s existed well before you, just like how it can be hard living in a city that’s existed hundreds of years before you were even born. Maybe that was the inspiration. Being young while the old towers above you.
