Hacine

Hacine is a former Heillange youth whose return from Morocco brings old rivalries back into view and whose later life is marked by a sharp conflict between ambition and domestic stability. He imagines wealth as a way to reverse past humiliation, yet the ordinary routines he eventually shares with Coralie do not erase his estrangement from the place, people, and self-image he left behind. His arc moves from an abrupt act of violence and plans for a criminal enterprise toward work, parenthood, and a wary reunion with Anthony, without resolving the disquiet that links these lives.

Identity and Return

Hacine reappears in the housing estate after time in Morocco and Spain, where people have heard he is living like a business magnate. The group gathered in the courtyard has known for hours that he is back and has spent the afternoon speculating about his return. At dusk, he approaches carrying Hacine’s ax handle. The object makes the reunion uneasy: his old acquaintances recognize him, but cannot tell what his return means or what he intends to do.

The image of success attached to Hacine is already unstable. He has not come back content to remain a distant, prosperous figure; he dislikes the people and atmosphere around him and is preoccupied with what he will do next. His return is a re-entry into local relationships as much as a change of location. The neighborhood’s curiosity, and the familiarity that makes his presence immediately consequential, set the stage for violence and a renewed attempt to command his circumstances.

Ambition, Violence, and the Business Plan

Hacine strikes Kader with the ax handle before Kader can finish addressing him. The sudden assault shocks the witnesses, and Hacine watches Kader without speaking. The act is an extreme reassertion of power, though the scene does not supply an explanation that would make it a considered response to something Kader has just said. Its abruptness is part of its effect: Hacine’s return becomes a threat before he has explained himself.

Afterward, Hacine turns his attention to establishing a drug business. He calculates that the kilo he has brought back might fetch at least four thousand francs, considers a direct purchase price of twelve hundred francs per kilo, and expects that buying through middlemen would cost five or six thousand. With an investment of twenty thousand francs, he believes he could acquire three or four kilos and sell them at twenty thousand francs apiece. These are projections he has rehearsed repeatedly, not proof that the enterprise has succeeded.

His planned role also matters to him. He expects to drive the first trips himself but wants to hand that work over quickly, concentrating instead on pricing, supply, logistics, and managing people in the field. With Eliott, he draws up lists of possible babysitters, lookouts, sellers, and managers, as well as people to persuade or intimidate. He imagines expanding across the territory between Reims and Brussels, Verdun and Luxembourg, and treats Kader’s assault as a precedent for the force he may use. Hacine’s appetite is no longer simply for comfort or public prestige: he wants money as a means of answering humiliation. The grand scale of his calculations contrasts with the precariousness of the first months, which he recognizes could be undone by a single setback.

Malek Bouali and the Cost of Violence

Hacine’s own history of injury complicates the force he uses against Kader. After losing his teeth in a previous assault, he is found in the men’s room at L’Usine, badly hurt. Malek Bouali kneels beside him and holds him; at the hospital, he visits every day. After the trial, Malek returns to Morocco, this time permanently. The care he gives Hacine at the hospital therefore sits alongside a lasting separation rather than a repaired family life.

In later telephone calls, Hacine hears Malek as a stranger, someone who seems to be fading from his life. He has promised himself for months that he will visit, but fears meeting a ghost. Coralie helps him bear this sense of an inheritance shaped by impossibility and the nearness of death. The father remains present as a voice and an obligation, but Hacine cannot yet turn that connection into a visit. The distance between them is both geographical and emotional.

Coralie, Work, and the Uneasy Household

With Coralie, Hacine finds a life that initially seems balanced. She has a technical diploma and a steady job at the prefecture; he meets her while drunk, and two months later he is having lunch with her parents. Their everyday comforts—household appliances, the prospect of a vacation, time with friends, games, and television—make what he calls an acceptable life. Coralie’s family is welcoming, and the relationship offers a counterweight to the instability of his ambitions.

That balance does not mean Hacine feels at home in the role of partner. Walking hand in hand with Coralie in public makes him self-conscious, particularly when they encounter old friends. He has gradually given up many of his former habits and does not regret the change: Coralie has helped free him from the feeling that his life is a total failure. Yet he still experiences their public couplehood as a part he performs badly, and remembers having dreamed of becoming a made man instead. His discomfort is not simply evidence that Coralie demands too much; he recognizes that she has been easygoing, even welcoming his friends into their home. The resistance comes from the gap between the life he once pictured and the settled identity he now occupies.

Honest work sharpens that gap. At one point, Hacine earns 7,240 francs a month and measures an expensive weekend away against the labor it would take to afford it. A reliable salary offers more security than unpredictable business, but he finds that its small, fixed limits transform pleasure into calculation. Buying food, paying insurance, or considering a trip becomes a series of trade-offs. His disappointment is not an abstract rejection of work: it grows from comparing the modest scale of wages with the larger life he had imagined for himself.

After Hacine and Coralie bring home their daughter, Océane, their days become an exhausting cycle of night waking, bottles, diapers, walks, and work. The couple struggle to talk without arguing and often pass one another in fatigue. Coralie is distressed by the weight she gained during pregnancy, and Hacine finds that attempts to reassure her can make matters worse. Her parents’ frequent, unannounced visits add another pressure, even when their help is kindly meant. Parenthood does not simply provide Hacine with the stable future he might have expected; it gives the household a fragile routine that both parents must sustain while tired and at odds.

Old Enmities and an Unfinished Ending

At a gathering with Coralie’s work friends, Hacine resents the social performance of couplehood: talk about apartments, plans, and shared outings leaves him feeling trapped among people whose concerns seem remote from his own. Coralie touches his knee to remind him to behave. Then, in the restroom, he recognizes the man who once destroyed his mouth. His face changes, and he gets to his feet despite Coralie trying to hold him back.

Hacine follows the man away from the celebration and toward the far end of the lake. When the man enters the water and swims into the darkness, Hacine calls after him, waits, and looks across the water. He finds the clothes and a hunting knife left behind, takes the knife, and walks back through the woods. He thinks about the man and his son, and regards himself as having the soul of a killer. The scene leaves the man’s fate unconfirmed in the passage; what it establishes is Hacine’s decision not to intervene and his unsettling lack of remorse afterward.

Later, Hacine and Coralie walk hand in hand with their dog through the Bastille Day crowd. He is still uncomfortable being seen as part of a couple, yet he does not let go. He wonders what became of old companions and learns that Kader served two years in prison for assault; Hacine says he would have liked to see him again. The past has not vanished, but it now reaches him through memories, absences, and encounters rather than through the business he once planned to build.

During the World Cup semifinal, Anthony enters a bar where Hacine is watching the match. They recognize one another, but the goal that gives France the lead overtakes the moment: the crowd erupts, and Anthony shakes Hacine in shared excitement. Hacine raises his fists with the others. Their brief reunion offers a striking contrast to the old antagonism that shaped their lives. It does not settle their history; it shows that, for a moment, collective celebration can place them together without requiring either man to explain the past. Hacine’s story remains suspended between that temporary belonging and his persistent sense that ordinary life is a role he has not learned to inhabit.