MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1 (PART 2)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
Produced by Thomas Langmann
Written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, based on the memoir L’Instinct de Mort by Jacques Mesrine
Released by Music Box Films
French with English subtitles
France/Canada/Italy. 134 min. Rated R
With Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Amalric, Ludivine Sagnier, Samuel Le Bihan, Gerard Lanvin, Olivier Gourmet & Anne Consigny
 

In my review for part one of the Jacques Mesrine gangster biopic, Killer Instinct, I noted how the film at times didn’t feel paced quite right, as if it were cut from a mini-series into a two-hour movie. The concluding film, Public Enemy No. 1, feels tighter, like a shot of adrenaline that sometimes wears off but then picks right up again. This is somewhat ironic, considering it’s 134 minutes vs. the 113 of the last film.

Part two never lags, and star Vincent Cassel is even more (and oddly) absorbing. Mesrine’s a character you might love to despise, a smooth operator who can break out of a prison almost with a snap of a finger (or a bit of luck, strikingly good timing, and an accomplice or two or three), rob a bank on one side of the street, and then go right over and rob the one opposite it.

One might wonder how a man who came from a seemingly normal middle-class background could become such a self-indulgent and brutal figure, who loves to talk up to the press of how he’s really a revolutionary. Cocky to a fault, he knows he can buck the system, but in the back of his mind, he also expects to be gunned down some day, especially after the third or fourth prison break and a shoot out with the cops.

His fall in this film counterbalances his rise in the first. After his capture from a daring breakout in part one, Mesrine’s back in prison facing trial. Almost as a lark, he writes his own autobiography after seeing his crimes are not reported on page one of the newspapers (thinking, as he tells his lawyer with the slyness of a dog, that no one will believe what he writes anyway). During his trial, he takes a judge hostage momentarily, breaks out again, and goes on to rob some more banks. It’s when he’s captured again that he meets up with another smooth criminal mastermind, François (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric), who conspires with Mesrine to breakout once again from prison. It’s not as heavily fortified as in the first film, but the escape’s still a nail-biting sequence of suspense in seeing how one action leads to another.

When Mesrine is on the lam with the less reckless François, his downfall begin. François, a career criminal, takes his job seriously, unlike Mesrine, who starts to believe all of his own self-made hype of being a revolutionary taking back power from authorities, albeit as a gangster. But what I liked and appreciated so much about Public Enemy No. 1 is how director Jean-François Richet plays up the contradictions of Jacques. He has moments where he knows exactly what he’s doing as well as some very human lapses (in one brief and touching scene, he breaks away from his criminal schemes and visits his dying father in the hospital). But at the same time, he’s self-deluded, becomes fat (literally and figuratively) with his self-worth, and doesn’t see how he’s a gangster, plain and simple. In an electrifying portrayal, Cassel digs deep into Mesrine and doesn’t shy away from making him a despicable anti-hero.

Richet succeeds in creating a much more solid structure than previously. All of the scenes serve a function for the story and flow together excellently. However, while I overall found part two to be more satisfying, it needs the first part to make Mesrine a more understandable, even sympathetic, being of his own creation. As a very French crime saga, Public Enemy No. 1 makes for one hell of a viewing experience, especially if one were to watch the two films back to back. It’s like taking the cool criminals of a Jean-Pierre Melville film and amping them up to 11, with more thrills, violence, and touches of French wit. Jack Gattanella
September 3, 2010