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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Track the two cameras. One follows a fugitive, the other watches a man work an audience.