Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

*Mesrine: Public Enemy #1* opens with its protagonist's death — the police ambush at the Porte de Clignancourt executed before the film has introduced a single scene — and in that structural gambit lies its governing aesthetic logic. What Richet creates is a **relation-image** of surveillance and complicity: positioned ahead of Mesrine by proleptic foreknowledge, the spectator watches every subsequent press interview and safe-house manuscript reading with the terrible awareness that his media campaign is simultaneously triangulating his location for the closing net. We become, in effect, co-investigators; the relation between our knowledge and his ignorance is the film's true dramatic engine. That tragic irony is inseparable from the **powers of the false** Richet assigns to Mesrine himself — a man who deploys crime as the medium for self-construction, staging press conferences and conducted interviews as though legend-making were a second vocation. The forger of identity, Deleuze's figure of narration that abandons the true for the mythological, finds vivid embodiment in Mesrine's escalating theatricality, where each act of violence demands a corresponding act of performance. Robert Gantz's cinematography keeps this self-mythologization honest: the observational handheld of **vérité / direct cinema** — explicitly indebted to Pontecorvo's unglamorous 16mm texture in *The Battle of Algiers*, which taught Richet to treat gunfire as tactile fact rather than spectacle — refuses to aestheticize the bloodshed, so that Mesrine's cinematic grandeur and the brute mechanics of his death exist in the same unsparing register.