France s former public enemy number one, a charismatic bank robber, kidnapper and killer who first gained notoriety in Canada, made a comeback Wednesday in a critically-acclaimed biopic.
Gerard Depardieu plays a gangster in the movie titled Public Enemy Number One, while Vincent Cassel takes the title role of Jacques Mesrine, who died in 1979 in a hail of police bullets.
The first installment of a two-part biopic directed by Jean-Francois Richet, it is subtitled Mesrine: The Death Instinct, after the autobiography the robber wrote in prison shortly before a spectacular final escape.
The fast-paced drama kicks off with his death in a police ambush near the Paris flea market, before cutting back to his early life as a soldier in the French army in Algeria in 1959.
When his army stint finishes, the young Mesrine returns to his native Paris, where he was born into a middle-class family in Clichy, and soon begins his life of crime.
He cuts his teeth with burglary and robbery, does time in jail, tries to go straight but fails and settles into what will become a spectacular criminal career that will take him across Europe and to the United States and Canada.
Mesrine was first dubbed public enemy number one in Canada s French-speaking Quebec province, before returning to France to become a household name hunted by the police and by criminal rivals.
The first of these two films – the second is due to be released next month in France and covers the last six years of his life – does not try glorify its subject.
The ?40 million ($51 million) budget film shows a nuanced, complex, bitter man with very violent instincts and megalomaniac tendencies.
This latest film on Mesrine – he has already been the subject of a biopic – has been keenly awaited in France, and on Wednesday caused much excitement in the media here.
The leftwing Liberation devoted its front page to the story. It sported a black and white photo of the real Mesrine, brandishing a gun pointed at the camera, which was taken while he was on the run just before his death.
The paper wonders if the film would enable the gangster to bask in fresh glory, 30 years after his brutal death under the bullets of forty cops.
Le Monde said the movie about the French legend was a brilliant stylistic exercise which has the intelligence to emphasize … the bitterness of a man who, in an era that lacked grandeur, throws himself into criminal action just as other people drown themselves. -AFP
