Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1

Dir: Jean-Francois Richet / France / Canada / Italy 2008 / 113 mins / Cert: 16

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1

Riverbank Arts CentreNewbridge

Event Details

  • Mon 29 Mar  2010
  • 8.00pm

  • Cost: €6

  • Venue Details
    Riverbank Arts Centre
    Main St.
    Newbridge



This is the second film in director Jean-François Richet’s two-part chronicle of the life of French master criminal, Jacques Mesrine. As Mesrine, Vincent Cassel continues to evade and frustrate the law, becomes entangled in his own celebrity, and begins to question his thrilling but ultimately pointless existence.

Although Richet’s films have him committing multiple murders, the actual truth of those events is still in question. It’s impossible to know how much artistic license Mesrine – a shameless self publicist – employed as he wrote his autobiography L’Instinct de Mort in his cell in La Santé prison.

Ending with a poignant, tense and shocking flourish, staged in the streets of central Paris on a national holiday, Cassel’s world-class performance propels Richet’s stylish films into the same league as benchmark gangster classics such as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II and Brian De Palma’s Scarface. - Edinburgh


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