Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
2008 · Jean-François Richet · Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the first scene and notice where it sits in the story. (structure)
Richet opens at Porte de Clignancourt in November 1979 and then doubles back six years. He never returns to that ambush to manufacture tension. The outcome is spent in the first reel.
Payoff: Suspense stops being about what happens and becomes about how. Every scene afterward carries knowledge that Mesrine does not have. In the reading: the relation/mental-image. Irony you carry that the character cannot is what the reading calls the relation-image: meaning built from what the viewer holds.
Notice when the handheld camera goes still. (camera)
Gantz shoots the running and the shootouts handheld and observational. When Mesrine performs for an audience, at a press conference or a hostage scene, the framing turns composed and static.
Payoff: The camera tells you which man is on screen. Movement means fugitive. Stillness means author, working an audience. In the reading: dicisign. A frame that makes you feel it watching someone watch their own audience is what the reading calls a dicisign.
Listen to how the gunfire sounds in the traffic jam. (sound)
Automatic fire in stalled Paris traffic, mixed raw with street noise and no operatic swell. The period soundtrack is treated as documentary texture: radio, rooms, the acoustics of institutions.
Payoff: The violence sounds like an event rather than a set piece. Nothing in the mix invites you to enjoy it.
Watch what Cassel's body does across the two films. (performance)
He carries roughly twenty added kilos and prosthetics, and plays Mesrine at fifty as more defended, more volatile, more constructed. The seams in the construction are there and he does not expose them early.
Payoff: The performance holds one person together across decades. You watch a man thicken into the image he has been building.
Look at the browns and grays of the corridors and hotel rooms. (light)
Police corridors, cheap rooms, Paris side streets in gray light, punctuated by the warmer saturation of period clothes and furniture. The film was shot on 35mm and the grain keeps it adjacent to news footage.
Payoff: The texture borrows the authority of documentary. That material world is then pointed at a man who lies for a living.
Once you have seen it
Track every interview and press stunt he arranges. (structure)
He grants interviews from safe houses, poses as a revolutionary, manages his crimes for the papers. The film declines to rule on whether the politics are real. It presents the evidence and stops there.
Payoff: His actual work is authorship. The crimes are the medium, and every gesture has to be larger than the one before it. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). A man who does not uncover a truth but forges one, shifting identity to fit his legend, is what the reading calls the forger.
Compare the cutting speed here with the first film. (cutting)
Schneid cuts harder and faster as the final years compress. The rhythm works as a hubris index, the way Goodfellas sped up while its narrator lost control. Solidarity erodes at the same rate.
Payoff: The pace measures the decay. The faster he builds the legend, the less room he has left to move in.
Watch the prison escape as a set of practical problems. (staging)
Mesrine and Besse scale the wall of La Sante with improvised equipment. Richet stages it methodically and attends to the physical detail, with no action-film grandeur anywhere in it.
Payoff: The procedure is the point. Competence gets shown rather than celebrated, which keeps the film from turning him into a hero.
Watch how the police operation is carried out at the close. (structure)
Operation Cygne is rendered with procedural fidelity. The film stages the finish as an ambush rather than an arrest and does not editorialize about it. Richet came up making films about institutional violence.
Payoff: The state gets the same scrutiny as the criminal. Neither one is exempt, and neither one is explained away.
Carry this in: Track the two cameras. One follows a fugitive, the other watches a man work an audience.