Watching Hate (La Haine) is like hanging out with “the wrong crowd” for a day, spending 24 tense hours with three guys who have a lot more to worry about that you do. Forget Boys N the Hood. Los Angeles is a million miles away from these Paris suburbs, where hate breeds non-stop between the police and the “troubled youths.”

Hate is a shocking film, devoid of color, frills, and special effects. If you’re like me, the last movie you saw in black and white was Schindler’s List, and you’re still not quite sure why Stephen Spielberg decided to do it that way. If Hate had been filmed in color, it could easily have fallen into the category of whiny teenage movies like Dazed and Confused and Reality Bites. Instead, Hate’s high-contrast black and white makes the movie feel as harsh as the lives it shows.

You’ve probably never met anyone like any of the characters in Hate. The movie is about three teenage guys who aren’t really friends, but they hang out together because no one else wants them around. Vinz, a Jew with sharp features and a short temper, is too dumb for his own good. Saïd is an Arab who plays it cool but can’t make decisions for himself. Hubert is an African boxer who dreams of leaving the neighborhood; he’s more rational that the others, but just as helpless. The three of them are the kind of guys who could disappear and no one would notice. The closest thing they have to a job is trading dope for cash in discreet handshakes, behavior that seems disturbingly normal for them.

When the movie starts, it feels like a documentary. Angry teenagers loot and protest while the police try to keep everything under control. Early in the movie, we hear that Abdel Ichah, one of Saïd’s friends, was beaten into a coma by police officers. When Vinz finds a gun lost by a police officer during the riots, he vows that he will “whack a pig” if Abdel dies.

For his directing efforts, Mathieu Kassovitz (Café au Lait) won three César awards, and Best Director at Cannes and the Lumières de Paris Awards. Although it’s hard to adjust to the movie’s gritty style, Kassovitz is able to use characters that we wouldn’t sit by on a subway and make us feel so comfortable with them that we are their friends by the end of the movie. In fact, when the police capture and brutally interrogate Hubert and Saïd to show a rookie cop how it’s done, we actually start hoping that the policemen will be punished.

Hate isn’t the type of movie that people will be talking about in the sense of Pulp Fiction.. It wasn’t meant to be popular, but it should be discussed because it covers an important problem. It will show an unblinking view of what life is like in places where there are more important things to worry about than schoolwork or meetings, a strikingly bold world where profanity and violence are a fact of life. The movie has only one lesson, and it can only be learned the hard way:

“Don’t you remember what the told us in school?” asks Hubert, trying to talk Vinz out of using violence to get even with the police. “Hate breeds hate.”