Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, the second film in a pair chronicling the life of notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), starts like part one: with the death of Mesrine. Yet, unlike the first, the film doesn’t hone in on the complexities of the character. Despite providing a vehicle for Cassel’s fantastic performance, Public Enemy No. 1 has its eye on the finish line of Mesrine’s death: Mesrine becomes less a character of a thousand faces and a little more typical of what you expect from a cinematic gangster, with the film focusing on events and action rather than character development. Though, perhaps that’s the point. Mesrine became so obsessed with his own press and public persona that he too loses sight of the complex character we left in Canada at the end of part one.
Part two catches up with Mesrine upon his return to France after a bold prison escape in Canada. Still hectically paced, director Jean-François Richet opts for far more of the thriller angle this time. The once detached reverence for Mesrine as a person that cut short the action sequences in the first film is replaced by protracted shootouts and chase scenes, turning Mesrine into a sort of villainous version of Daniel Craig’s Bond.
The pacing remains problematic in part two. The only time we watch a scenario develop from inception is during a prison break from a maximum-security jail in France — a moment that was formative for Mesrine, as he becomes the “new” Mesrine who’s now concerned with delivering a shocking political message through the media. Cassel’s performance remains top notch as he takes Mesrine through the delusion and shedding of his old self. The prison break in the first film exposes a plethora of motivation and confusion for Mesrine, where his motivations in part two start to feel one-dimensional and pre-destined. In one telling scene, he kills a journalist who railed against him in the paper, photographs his dead body in a cave, and sends the pictures to the press. In his mind, this will make them respect him more and think twice about crossing him. But this is typical of the person he has become. There is a disconnect between his reality and the rest of the world. It’s an interesting character development, an altering of who he is as a by-product of who he was, but it doesn’t actually make the filmic character more interesting.
His politics become murkier too, as he tries to link up with others he’d identify as revolutionaries as he identifies himself. It’s a change in self-perception developed to fend off the notion of the meaningless cycle he thought his life had become. In one scene, Mesrine meets up with an old friend, Charly (Gérard Lanvin). Here, Mesrine becomes offended at the notion that he may be more a bandit than a revolutionary. This is a telling scene, revealing not only his dependence on the perception of others, but also the film’s meta-cautionary tale. The film-going public emulates his trajectory in many ways: we love Mesrine, and characters of his ilk, for the glitz, the boldness, the wit — the tropes of masculinity that we expect from this brand of anti-hero. Mesrine’s own obsession with these themes makes him the press-starved bandit he becomes. Always searching for a new angle, a proper reputation, respect. The part of ourselves as film-lovers that we can see in Mesrine is what takes over inside him, what makes him become the monster. And while part two lacks what made the first film so wonderful, it takes another tack that makes the viewer complicit in the violence and the demise of Mesrine, creating a whole new tension and reason why Mesrine is such a fascinating subject.
