Lacenaire (1990) - film review

In the 1830s, Pierre-François Lacenaire was the most notorious criminal in France.  From an early age, he rebelled against his comfortable bourgeois background, managing to get himself expelled from a Jesuit seminary.  Thereafter, he made a career of antagonising the Church, the army and the middle classes through his conduct and intemperate writings.  And so began his short, but eventful, career of violent crime.  With hired henchman to do his dirty work, Lacenaire killed and murdered with gay abandon, almost as if it were his duty to society.  Soon, he is caught and tried.  In his prison cell whilst he awaits execution, he drafts his memoirs, to be published after his death.

Daniel Auteuil is on fine form in this slick period drama which paints an accurate and uncompromising portrait of one of France’s most famous criminals.  The inspiration for Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, Pierre-François Lacenaire was the kind of self-obsessed amoral sociopath who was both loved and feared by a country that was still coming to terms with the fallout from the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars.  Lacenaire epitomised France’s intellectual elite at the time, contemptuous of conventional ideology and zealously attacking the establishment, partly through vanity, partly through disillusionment with the revolution, but also through some misguided belief that a better society could only be built once the ordinary man had freed himself from the shackles of a self-serving, all-controlling State.  If it meant killing a few old women along the way, so be it.

The film attempts to de-construct Lacenaire, rather like a pathologist might perform an autopsy.  Having shown us the condemned man’s last few hours before his execution, the film pieces together his life through a series of nested flashbacks.  Whilst the approach is original and allows some degree of narrative economy, the film inevitably feels fragmented, passionless and, at times, confusing.  The film cannot be faulted on the quality of its sets, attention to period detail, and cinematography.   Excellence in these areas only shows up the weaknesses in others – too much attention is given too the mechanics of the execution and Larcenaire’s criminal exploits, there is a lack of human feeling in the drama, and some of the characters feel painfully two-dimensional.

Fortunately, there is a trump card, in the form Daniel Auteuil’s performance, which switches from great intimacy and sensitivity to manic excess without losing any sense of conviction.  Where the film is strongest and most poignant in its portrayal of the (very probably homosexual) relationship between Larcenaire and his loyal associate Avril.  By contrast, the rapport between Larcenaire and Allard, the police chief who arrests him and who is entrusted with publishing his autobiography, is not so convincing.   It may not be a masterpiece, but we probably get a far better idea of the man who was Pierre-François Lacenaire from this film than we do from Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945).

© James Travers 2005

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