Film Review
La Mentale has a pleasing retro-feel to it. It's a film that
harks back to the classic French gangster films of the 1970s and '80s, reusing
all the old familiar motifs the genre has to offer and re-packaging all this
with a new modern gloss.
It is a slick, gritty production that boasts
some extremely well choreographed action scenes and some artful cinematography.
But for all that it is a pretty vacuous exercise in imitation and has precious
little of the greatness that marks out the gangster films of the past that
it is so eager to reference - films like
Du Rififi chez les hommes
(1955) and
Le Deuxième
souffle (1966).
La Mentale is imitation for its own
narcissistic sake, and even diehard aficionados of this hardboiled genre
will find the film's tepid rehash of recycled material hard to digest.
In the film, Samuel Le Bihan and Samy Naceri play two cousins, Dris and Yanis,
who resort to petty crime to help them find a
way out of their life of social deprivation. Dris gets caught by the
police and ends up in prison. On his release four years later, Dris
has set his mind on going straight. He gets himself an honest job and
plans to settle down with his girl friend Lise, confident that his criminal
career is behind him. But Yanis has other ideas. By now, he has
become a gangster hotshot and he is keen that his older cousin should, for
the sake of family ties, lend his support to his criminal exploits.
Things come to a head when a rival gangster, Marco, begins to muscle in on
Yanis's territory. In the end, Dris has no choice but to return to
his former way of life - except now the stakes are much higher. It
isn't only the police that the two cousins have to contend with. They
are also up against some dangerous hoodlums who are determined to wipe them
out - in true gangster film fashion.
Director Manuel Boursinhac has an obvious flair for the policier genre. He
directs the film with confidence and élan, seemingly undeterred by
the morass of clichés he is juggling. Not having had much success
in the cinema, Boursinhac would devote the greater part of his career to
French television, including directing several episodes of the hit crime
series
Engrenages (a.k.a.
Spiral) (2010). Probably the
film's most obvious failing is the casting of Samuel Le Bihan and Samy Naceri
in the two lead male roles - both are terrible choices that pretty well destroy
the film's integrity from the word go.
Apart from the fact that the two lead actors have no physical resemblance
and appear to have come from completely different strata of French society,
they look ill at ease in their roles. Le Bihan (otherwise a fine actor)
is patently miscast as urban lowlife of North African origin and has never
given a less convincing performance. Naceri is likewise too timid and
likeable to make us believe he is a hardened criminal - by now he is too
strongly associated with his role in the
Taxi
films ever to be convincing in the tough guy Robert De Niro-type role.
The lead actors do what they can with the so-so script (written by Naceri's
brother Bibi), but even with an actress as classy as Clotilde Courau on board
it's a challenge to watch them mug their way through the mass of lamely glued
together contrivances that masquerades as a plot. With better casting
choices and a slightly more original script,
La Mentale may have been
a far more substantial film, rather than the mildly entertaining timewaster
that it is.
© James Travers 2016
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