Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film opens with the end. A man sits in stalled Paris traffic, a vehicle eases alongside, and automatic fire fills the street — mixed raw, no opera, just an event that happened. Porte de Clignancourt, 2 November 1979. Then Richet doubles back, and you spend the next two hours watching a man you have already watched die.

That structure is the whole argument. In an ordinary crime film, suspense rides on outcome: will he get away, will the heist hold. Richet and his editor Hervé Schneid spend that currency in the first reel and refuse to touch it again — having shown the ambush, they never cut back to it to manufacture tension. What's left is process. And process, watched without the question 'how does it end,' stops being action and edges toward reading.

Deleuze splits cinema into two regimes. In the movement-image, a man perceives a situation and acts to change it; action resolves things; the cut serves the chain. In the time-image, action no longer resolves, and time is felt for itself. On its surface Mesrine is pure movement-image — a large-form action film. A global situation (the French state, its prisons, its closing police net) presses on a man until he acts: the La Santé wall scaled with improvised gear, the kidnappings, the shootouts. That is the action-image at full power, force against force — what Deleuze calls the binomial — and Richet lifts its geometry straight from Melville's Le Samouraï, where sight-lines through Paris interiors decide who survives. The encompassing milieu, those desaturated grey corridors of 1970s institutional France, is the synsign: the situation that calls the act out of the man.

But the film knows its real subject isn't the robberies. Mesrine's actual work is authorship. He grants interviews from safe houses, poses as a revolutionary, manages his crimes for the press, builds himself into a media artifact. Deleuze has a precise name for this figure: le faussaire, the forger — the protagonist who doesn't uncover a truth but forges one, shifting identity to fit the legend he's composing. This is what Deleuze means by the powers of the false: truth and falsity made undecidable, not as a defect but as a creative engine. Is Mesrine a revolutionary, or a narcissist dressing armed robbery in politics? The film won't rule, because the question is malformed. He is a man inventing himself as he goes, and the lie is the work.

Here the medium matters. Cinema carries a standing contract — the documentary promise that what's on film happened, that films don't lie. Richet shoots on 35mm precisely to borrow that promise: real grain, analog texture, a surveillance-camera dispassion that sets the film in the same material world as the news footage of the actual Mesrine. Then he aims that truth-machine at a compulsive liar. The medium's honesty becomes the instrument for filming a forgery. That is why Robert Gantz photographs the film two ways — handheld and observational when Mesrine runs, composed and static when he performs, at a press conference or a hostage scene that slides into theatre. In those still framings the camera becomes a dicisign: we feel it watching a man who is watching his audience. It declines to be seduced. It records the performance as performance. What we're seeing, in Deleuze's late vocabulary, is fabulation — a subject caught in the act of legending himself.

And legends rot. As the self-mythology peaks, the cutting tightens — a velocity Richet inherits directly from Goodfellas, where editing speed is a hubris index, the protagonist's narcissism accelerating toward its own wall. Around Mesrine the solidarity erodes, the paranoia thickens, the man feeds on his own image until present and media-reflection can't be told apart. This is crystal-decomposition: an ordered world, here a constructed self, rotting from inside even as it shines brightest. The faster he composes the legend, the faster it consumes him.

The lens also tells you where to sit. Because we know the ending and we know he's performing, we hold every public gesture as a doubled thing — sincere act and press release at once. That is the relation-image: meaning built from relations the viewer carries in, the audience as a knowing third party reading the irony the character can't.

The lineage runs clean in both directions. Bonnie and Clyde gave the outlaw-as-celebrity its template, including the cruel joke that fame accelerates institutional destruction rather than escaping it; Dog Day Afternoon staged the criminal performing for a media crowd while the perimeter tightened; The Battle of Algiers modeled the tactile, unglamorous gunfire Richet refuses to aestheticize; La Haine bequeathed Cassel's volatile physicality. What Mesrine adds is proof of concept: the powers of the false don't require Welles's fractured testimony or Robbe-Grillet's contradictions. The forger can live inside a clean, linear, commercially aggressive genre film, smuggled in by one performance and one structural decision — put the death first.

Watch it again and track the two cameras. Notice the moment the handheld goes still. That's the tell: it means Mesrine has stopped being a fugitive and started being an author, and the film has quietly stopped filming a man to film a forgery.