The burning of the banlieues

In 1995 a raw monochrome drama gripped cinema-goers and shook France. Mathieu Kassovitz’s “La Haine” (Hatred), a stylised film about youth, masculinity, guns, friendship and police brutality, awakened the beautiful quarters of Paris to life in the angular high-rise banlieues that ring its cities. More recently Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables” calmly and forcefully exposed the anger and anguish among a younger generation of boys growing up in those peripheral estates. Successive French film-makers have put their finger on the rage that can at times set the banlieues ablaze. It happened in 2005. Now it has happened again. Yet after all these years France still seems at a loss to understand why.