Les Lyonnais (2011) - film review

From his boyhood, a miserable time in a gypsy camp, Edmond Vidal has always had a sense of family loyalty and he remains proud of his humble origins.  This explains why he is still devotedly attached to his childhood friend Serge Suttel, with whom he experienced his first taste of crime and prison life.  It was with Serge that Edmond formed one of the most notorious criminal gangs of the early 1970s.  Now in his late fifties, Edmond tries to forget this period of his life.  Happily married with children and grandchildren, he is a reformed character.  The same cannot be said of Serge, who shares none of his former friend’s regret for his life of crime...

Once a gangster, always a gangster - that is the glib aphorism that director Olivier Marchal seeks to unpick in his latest gangster thriller, a welcome return to form after his relatively lacklustre 2008 film MR 73.  Between these two cinematic excursions, Marchal took time out to direct a prime time French thriller TV series, Braquo, which, judging by the reaction it has garnered in France, augurs well for a very successful career in television.  Watching Les Lyonnais, Marchal’s latest foray into gangland escapism, it is easy to see that the film would have worked much better as a television series.  The constraints of cinema are cruel and unforgiving, and the epic story that Marchal so evidently wants to tell is just too big and complex for a single mainstream feature film.

It is telling that the director had originally conceived Les Lyonnais as a two-part film, in a similar vein to Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine (2008), the first part relating the gangster protagonists’ criminal past, the second part dealing with their traumatic (delayed retribution) present.  When this proved to be infeasible, Marchal opted to weave the two storylines into a single film, resorting to the old device of the sepia-tinted flashback.  The inevitable consequence of this brutal story compression and manic hopping between past and present is that the film lacks coherence and struggles to hold our attention.  It takes a while for the principal characters to establish themselves and, unavoidably, Marchal is compelled to fall back on shorthand (well-worn clichés and dull archetypes) that makes the film feel dated and shallow.  As an extended TV series, Marchal would have had the time and the freedom to paint a richer and more nuanced saga, with well-drawn characters explored in sufficient depth for us to fully engage with them.  By cramming all this into one film, he has had to compromise so much that you wonder why he bothered.  Imagine what we’d have got if Francis Ford Coppola had been minded to stuff The Godfather Parts I, II and III into a single 100 minute film - it would be something like this.

Les Lyonnais has the added problem that it is too easily compared with the generally well-regarded Mesrine diptych.  Both films concern themselves with notorious gangsters who were active in the 1970s, hirsute bank-robbers whose criminal exploits (which surprisingly involved next to no blood-shedding) were so widely reported in the media that they became overnight celebrities.   For his film, Marchal chose to depart from reality rather than attempt a broadly accurate account of his protagonists’ underworld adventures, only loosely basing his film on the autobiography of reformed gangster Edmond Vidal.  (The character Serge Suttel never existed in real life - he is actually an amalgam of three of Vidal’s gangster associates.)  Marchal’s poetic licence provides a too easy route by which he can humanise his protagonists and you can’t help thinking that the film would have had more power if it had stuck closer to the facts, instead of bending the truth for dramatic effect and building to a denouement that is so contrived it is almost laughable.   

Whilst Les Lyonnais matches Mesrine in its pace, authentical period detail and spectacular action sequences, it falls somewhat short of that film’s sustained visual artistry and is much weaker on the characterisation front.  What it does have going for it are some exceptional performances from its lead actors.   Gérard Lanvin is a superb casting choice for the part of Vidal and gives what is possibly the most sympathetic and convincing gangster portrayal since Lino Ventura (originally the part was slated for Alain Delon, who would probably have been far less effective in the role).  Tchéky Karyo is just as impressive as Vidal’s less scrupulous partner in crime - the grimly psychotic, Mephistophelean nature of his character making an effective contrast with Lanvin’s more humane portrayal of a man who so desperately wants to turn over a new leaf but cannot.  It is largely through the quality of the acting that Les Lyonnais surpasses Marchal’s previous gangster films Gangsters (2002) and MR 73 (2008), but some complacency in its mise-en-scène and screenwriting prevents it from having quite the impact of 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004), the director’s best film to date.

© James Travers 2012

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