Love Quote by Mathieu Kassovitz

Kassovitz is taking a tourist postcard and setting it on fire. The line pivots on a simple rhetorical trick: he accepts the myth of Paris as "love" and "light" only to insist that every glowing slogan casts a shadow. It is less a philosophical shrug than a warning about branding. When a city is sold as romance and enlightenment, everything that contradicts that story gets pushed to the margins - geographically, politically, and emotionally.

The intent is realist, but also strategic: to pre-empt the audience's expectations. Viewers arrive with cinematic Paris in their heads; Kassovitz announces that his France is not that export product. The paired opposites ("love/hate", "light/darkness") do two things at once. They make the point feel inevitable - like physics, not opinion - and they implicate the audience in the problem. If you only came for light, you helped create the darkness by refusing to look at it.

The subtext is about who gets seen and who gets edited out. In the context of Kassovitz's work (especially the France of the banlieues, policing, and social fracture), "reality" means the parts of the nation that don't fit the self-image of sophistication. Paris becomes a metaphor for the Republic's moral PR: universalist ideals on the surface, unequal treatment underneath.

It's a director talking about representation, but also about power. Myths don't just prettify; they anesthetize. By insisting on hate and darkness as co-residents of love and light, Kassovitz frames his project as an act of refusal: no more aesthetic alibis, no more luminous lies.