Mesrine:  L’ennemi public no 1

Jean-François Richet (2008)

If you didn’t know the two films were released in the same year, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Public Enemy No 1 was a sequel made some years later – an attempt to rekindle the interest of the first film, Killer Instinct.  This second part of the Jacques Mesrine story has high-energy editing but is running on empty in terms of its subject’s character development.  Covering the last six years of Mesrine’s life (1973-79), it’s a bit longer than the first picture but it feels a lot longer.  Its first half is largely a series of heists and audacious exits and entrances.  Some of these are spectacular, as when Mesrine smuggles a gun – hidden for him above a toilet, as Michael Corleone’s gun was hidden, in The Godfather (recently rereleased) – into a court that’s about to pass sentence.  (Mesrine takes the judge hostage in order to make his getaway.)   The short scene in which Mesrine disguises himself as a doctor, in order to visit his dying father in hospital, stands out in a different way.  When he suddenly breaks down and says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ to his father, the effect is startling:  Mesrine’s proudly maintained public persona crumbles in a private moment with a parent.   For the most part, though, I found myself merely comparing the action sequences with each other – was the one I was watching more or less exciting than the one before? – in an almost abstract way.  There’s next to no context beyond what you supply yourself, from having seen Killer Instinct.

The film picks up in its second hour:  in the description of Mesrine’s relationship with a young prostitute, Sylvia; in the uneasy alliance between him and another criminal, François Besse, with whom he’s made his latest prison break;  in the kidnap of Henri Lelièvre, a Rachman-like property owner in Paris.   By this stage, Mesrine is developing galloping pretentiousness:  he sees himself as a social revolutionary – a kindred spirit to the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade in Italy.  Fired by the part he played in getting the SCU in Montreal closed down a few years previously, he talks of a mission to purge France of maximum security prisons.  He boasts that he’s an honourable and socially responsible criminal, who robs the rich and exploits no one.   He abuses Sylvia – physically as well as verbally – for flaunting herself in the presence of a man called Charly Bauer, whose criminal activities are more coherently politically motivated than Mesrine’s own.  Up to this point you assume that Sylvia has teamed up with Mesrine for entirely hedonistic reasons – sex and shopping.  When this very material and, it has seemed, thoughtless girl tells Mesrine, tearfully but matter of factly, that he’ll die alone, it comes as a jolt to the audience as well as to him.  Frustrated by Mesrine’s appetite for publicity as well as his messianic tendencies, Besse exasperatedly explains that he doesn’t want to destroy the system – he wants to continue to make a criminal living from it.

The octogenarian Lelièvre – a ‘nasty old piece of filth’ as Mesrine, in planning his abduction, describes him – is too sharp for Mesrine.  Lelièvre is as weary as he is scared, and a natural pragmatist:  he scoffs at the ten million franc ransom – Mesrine’s opening bid – telling his kidnapper that he’s far too old to be worth that kind of money.   To Mesrine’s chagrin, Lelièvre also points out the similarities between them, the differences between a revolutionary and a professional criminal – and his certainty that Mesrine is therefore not a revolutionary.    This is all credible enough in psychological terms but there’s not much tension in these exchanges because Mesrine’s vainglory is shallow – he can be too easily deflated.  (The effect is similar when he’s infuriated by people pronouncing his surname wrong – ‘Mayreen – not Mesreen!’ as the subtitle has it.)

This is Vincent Cassel’s Raging Bull:  he put on stones to play the older Mesrine and he carries the added weight convincingly.  As in Killer Instinct, Cassel is an utterly dominant presence but his professed contempt[1] for the man he’s playing, for all that it’s understandable, sometimes makes it hard to separate the empty man from a superficial interpretation of him.  Ludivine Sagnier’s supernal prettiness makes Sylvia’s apparent empty-headedness all the more startling:  when Sylvia develops a loyalty to Mesrine that she doesn’t seem quite to understand, it’s touching.  Mathieu Amalric is strong as Besse and Georges Wilson memorably exhausted and cynical as Lelièvre.   (Wilson, at eighty-seven, is five years older than Lelièvre is meant to be.)  The outstanding supporting performance comes from Olivier Gourmet, as Broussard, the police chief leading the hunt for Mesrine.  I’d seen Gourmet in films by the Dardenne brothers but he’s very different here:  he brings Broussard to life very believably – you see the man’s snagged, determined professionalism and how this shades into a macho anxiety not to be bested by Mesrine (Gourmet also suggests Broussard’s furtive admiration for l’ennemi public numero un).   There’s good work from Gérard Lanvin (as Bauer), Samuel Le Bihan (Michel Ardouin, another of Mesrine’s accomplices), Anne Consigny (Mesrine’s advocate), Hervé Laudière and Françoise Le Plénier (a farmer and his wife forced to drive Mesrine and Besse to safety), and Alain Fromager (as Jacques Dallier, an unpleasant right-wing journalist who still doesn’t deserve what he gets).

Apart from the attempted murder of Dallier – who’s written a piece impugning Mesrine’s crook’s honour – there doesn’t seem to be as much violence in this film as in its other half.  (This may be an illusion – perhaps, after Killer Instinct, I went to Public Enemy No 1 primed to expect mayhem and, in effect, more inured to it.  Even so, the assault on Dallier was plenty.)  Jean-François Richet ends the picture with an account of Mesrine’s ‘assassination’ by Broussard’s men (which very nearly goes wrong), in the Place de Clignancourt in November 1979 – it’s eventually bloody, of course, but the build-up to the police’s opening fire is painstaking.  Once the killing has happened, Richet and the writer Abdel Raouf Dafri make their points crudely but forcefully.   Mesrine was avid for celebrity and he has died a public death – in the centre of Paris, in broad daylight, in front of crowds of people.  Although Sylvia predicted that he would die alone, he doesn’t – thanks to her presence in the passenger seat of his BMW (the hail of Paris police bullets naturally calls to mind the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde):  Mesrine has gone through a fair number of partners of different kinds in the course of the two films but Sylvia stays with him.  She survives the bullets, and we gather that the pet dog on her lap in the car does too.  In Killer Instinct, the French army in Algeria and the authorities at the Montreal maximum security prison were shown to have no more regard for human life and dignity than Mesrine:  after they’ve killed him, the police treat him not like a dog but as something inferior.   Broussard, ignoring Mesrine’s bleeding corpse for a moment, calls for someone to get the poodle to a vet.

2 September 2009

 

[1] See note on Mesrine: Killer Instinct.