‘Mesrine’: Public enemy, not a hero

Paris — As the players came together to make an era-spanning two-film biopic on larger-than-life French gangster Jacques Mesrine, there was plenty of pressure to play to his outlaw legend. After all, as director Jean-François Richet suggests, not a lot of gangsters have been voted “the most popular man” in their country, as Mesrine was in 1978.

If ever a modern gangster’s popular mythology lent itself to a grandiose rebel treatment, it is Mesrine’s. His 20-year career in crime included death-defying prison breaks, frequent police shootouts, sassy rejoinders to judges and journalists, and dozens of bank robberies — sometimes two in one day. In a stultified France, Mesrine himself suggested that his goal was to live as a truly free man.

Mesrine’s path through life seemed to deliver him to the very doorway of celluloid, where so many of his predecessors — Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and John Dillinger — have been immortalized as the people’s outlaws. France’s chameleonic criminal, who was dubbed the “man of a hundred faces,” actually mimicked those oft-fictionalized gangsters who preceded him as Public Enemy No. 1 by four decades.

For an example of the easy path, the filmmakers needed look no further than the heroic rebel portrayed in the quickly forgotten 1984 film “Mesrine.” But as Vincent Cassel, the star of the soon-to-be-released gangster epic, makes clear, “We didn’t want to glorify the gangster Jacques Mesrine.”

In fact, scriptwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri, who also penned last year’s award-winning French prison drama, “A Prophet,” initially refused to tell the gangster’s tale. It wasn’t because of his gang banging; it was the young Mesrine’s alleged role in atrocities as a military man in colonial France. “The writer said, ‘I don’t want to write a movie about this guy. What he did during the war in Algeria was so bad,’” Cassel explains in a phone interview. “And I liked that. We weren’t going to be fans.”

In fact, Cassel actually walked away from the plum role after the initial director, Barbet Schroeder, sought to purge difficult early scenes that portray Mesrine’s racist and misogynic brutality, he says. “I was bluffing, but I really risked it all. In France we have a tendency to go darker. I wanted to keep all of those things. The bottom line is that we have a responsibility in France to tell the story of that guy. You can’t pretend he is Robin Hood when he isn’t.”

That willingness to explore moral ambiguity places Mesrine firmly in a long line of intense, challenging and emotionally complex French underworld films.

A few French film critics have noted the productions’ tacit influences, films like “Borsalino,” which recounts the story of a pair of small-time criminals who gradually start to take their work more seriously, starring Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo (1970), or the classic “Le Samourai” (1967), in which Delon plays a perfectionist murderer who finally makes a mistake. In a wink to such films, the makers of “Mesrine” sought to cast Delon as the young Mesrine’s crime-world mentor; the role ultimately went to Gérard Depardieu, who is a generation younger and who fills the part with almost troubling ease.

Richet and Cassel say there weren’t any direct gangster film influences on the Mesrine biopic, though they both spoke glowingly of Jean-Pierre Melville’s contemplative crime world thriller, “Le Cercle Rouge” (1970), which is stylistically very different from their fast-moving diptych. “When it is a good movie, it should rise above a ‘genre’ movie,” says Cassel. “When Melville did a ‘gangster movie,’ it was a chef d’oeuvre. ‘A Prophet was not a ‘genre movie.’ ”

Ambitious French underworld films, it is true, don’t merely tend to blur right and wrong, good and bad, with key characters crossing and re-crossing moral lines until they hardly exist. They tend to focus intensely on a character (often a criminal but also sometimes a morally ambiguous investigator).

“Mesrine” descends from a genre that largely disappeared from French cinema, submerged by lesser television imitators before the time of the gangster’s death in 1979. Known in French as a polar, or a police-investigation-driven thriller, the genre really resurfaced in the cinema in a meaningful way only in the middle of the last decade, according to Jean-Pierre Lavoignat, who is the former editor in chief of the film magazine Première. It was the film “36” (2004), starring Daniel Auteuil and Depardieu, that reminded viewers (and apparently other filmmakers) how rich the genre could be, Lavoignat says.

Critic and documentary filmmaker Patrick Fabre describes “Mesrine” as a “French-style polar” — and he clarifies that the genre, with its strong literary roots, stands apart from American police stories because the French ones are more of an “exploration of a personality than of a film genre.” That said, French and American polars have at different times influenced one another.

More than anything, the fast-paced Mesrine epic is an exploration — of a charismatic, contradictory, generous and cruel man on a quixotic series of criminal quests, and of the intense love stories that interweave with his life of crime. To Fabre, the strong Bonnie-and-Clyde undercurrents make up “the heart of the film” and help “Mesrine” to rise “above and beyond the genre.”

Richet, who previously directed “All About Love” (2001) and “Inner City” (1995) before his first foray into American cinema with his 2005 re-imagining of “Assault on Precinct 13,” expressed appreciation for the fast-paced American director Michael Mann. But in many ways, “Mesrine” shows Richet to be a throwback to an older generation of ambitious American filmmakers, including some who were inspired by the great French polars, such as John Frankenheimer, who made “French Connection II.”

Nonetheless, Richet sounds uncomfortable on the topic of the biopic’s cinematic references. “I have influences that must come out, like all directors, but I always speak about reality,” he says. “I am never thinking of other films.”

Complex character

But if the film is cinematically referential to (or reverential of) a wide array of classic gangster films, it isn’t necessarily all his doing. Mesrine himself loved old French and American gangster films, and he used those legendary characters to help define his own image, creating a hall-of-mirrors effect that is palpable in the biopic.

“Cinema inspired him,” says Lavoignat, who co-wrote the book “Mesrine: 30 Years on the Run in the Cinema.” “He was fascinated by the gangsters he had seen at the movies. He modeled his life on those films.” Mesrine’s influences included James Cagney and French underworld film legends like Belmondo and Delon.

However it came about, this complex look at a fascinating gangster has been rewarded with broad commercial success in France. The films — “Mesrine: Killer Instinct,” scheduled for an Aug. 27 release in the U.S., followed by “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1” a week later — also earned 10 César (French Oscar) nominations and three trophies, including best actor for Cassel and best director for Richet.

Critics have praised Cassel’s remarkably layered portrayal of the gangster’s multi-faceted persona. The French version of Elle magazine gave the two-film “Mesrine” biopic what might be the ultimate compliment for the genre, calling it a “marvel of ambiguity and intensity.”

Cassel may be known in Hollywood for his roles in “ Shrek,” “Ocean’s 12” and “Ocean’s 13” — and for the sexually brutal film “Irreversible,” in which he costarred with his wife, Italian actress Monica Bellucci — but he is also one of the most skilled and versatile actors working today. That is abundantly clear from his overarching portrayal of a real man who engaged in horrible acts and somehow retained much of his appeal.

That appeal helps to explain why T-shirts of Cassel’s Mesrine now sell alongside those of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana (and Che Guevara) in shops in Paris’ Porte de Clignancourt neighborhood, near where Mesrine’s body was riddled with bullets in a heavily militarized police ambush.

Even though the two-part biopic is book-ended with particularly atrocious acts on Mesrine’s part, Cassel notes, “Strangely enough, people still think he is sympathetic. If you like him, it is like the big bad wolf: Maybe you shouldn’t like him, but you have this fascination.”

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