On Movies: Cassel's inside story on Mesrine's death

One day when Vincent Cassel was 12, his younger brother returned home late from a soccer match at his Paris school, all abuzz. He and his classmates had been stopped on the street by police and told to get down on the sidewalk. They heard gunshots around the corner at the Porte de Clignancourt, where, the brother excitedly recounted, the police had just killed "a very famous gangster."

That was Jacques Mesrine, the notorious French criminal whose audacious run of killings, kidnappings, armed robberies, break-ins, and prison breakouts made him a familiar face (in various disguises) on newspapers and TV. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mesrine was as (in)famous in France as Dillinger or Scarface were during their Most Wanted days here.

Now, Cassel, thirtysome years later, stars in not one but two epics about the Gallic bad guy: Mesrine: Part 1 - Killer Instinct, playing at the Ritz Five, and Mesrine: Part 2 - Public Enemy, opening Friday. Both were directed by Jean-François Richet. The films, which together took close to a year to make, take the viewer through three decades of Mesrine's life. And they required Cassel to gain major poundage to resemble the paunchy, middle-aged hood shot and killed in November 1979.

In fact, Killer Instinct begins with that deadly fusillade on the street in the Cassel family's neighborhood, when a truckload of French police marksmen blocked Mesrine's BMW at a stoplight and opened fire.

"But you see, I have that story about my brother coming home, and everybody in France has at least one story about Mesrine," Cassel says. "It's like, 'Oh, I knew his sister,' or 'I knew a girl who was going out with him when he was going to summer camp,' or 'We could see him in the cafe drinking coffee while he was wanted by everybody.' . . .

"And it's not like he's a wonderful historical character, not like he's Napoleon. . . . But through him, we get this snapshot of France and what it was like then."

Cassel, wiry and intense, blazed onto the scene with the controversial La Haine in 1995 and incited more critical clamor with the long and graphic rape scene in 2002's Irreversible (with Monica Bellucci, to whom he has been married since 1999). He appeared in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen and in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.

Mesrine was released in France two years ago, winning its star a César Award, the French equivalent of the Oscar. Finally, it has arrived in the States, and Cassel, in Rio de Janeiro doing research for a planned shoot there next year, is almost finished talking about his crime-world undertaking.

"Mesrine was just a normal guy who didn't want to lead a normal life - like, I guess, a lot of us," says Cassel, who by way of preparation for the role met with members of Mesrine's family, with police, and with people who "worked" alongside the gangster. For a while, Barbet Schroeder was going to make the film, but Cassel and the Single White Female director differed in their take on the outlaw. Like many in France, Schroeder saw Mesrine as a folk hero, a "real revolutionary."

And indeed, in Public Enemy, we see Mesrine as he embraces the separatist movement in Québec, and other leftist and radical causes.

"I think he wants to look like a revolutionary, but he's not, really," Cassel muses about the man he portrays. "He's doing all that for his own sake, and I felt that that was what interesting about it. There's no redemption, there's no reason, beyond ego."

Since the arduous task of filming Mesrine, Cassel has worked on four new films, and there are more to come. He confirms that he and his Eastern Promises colleague Viggo Mortensen are reteaming with director Cronenberg for a sequel about the Russian mob in London. Cassel also just collaborated with Mortensen and Cronenberg in A Dangerous Method, about the relationship between psychotherapy pioneers Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, adapted from the Christopher Hampton play.

"So Viggo is doing Freud," Cassel reports, "Michael Fassbender is Jung, and then you have Keira Knightley and myself - we're doing, let's say, the patients."

And the actor appears in Darren Aronofsky's dark new thriller Black Swan, with Natalie Portman, and in Our Day Will Come, a rageful commentary on race and ethnic prejudice from director Romain Gavras, about redheads as the new outcasts, the new targets of hate. (Gavras also directed singer Mia's "Born Free" video, which had a similar theme.) Both Black Swan and Our Day Will Come will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

"Our Day Will Come is about redheads rebelling against society, and it's obviously a metaphor about religious and racial minorities," Cassel explains. "Blacks, Arabs, Jews - it becomes politically incorrect [to address] the issue directly, but strangely enough with redheads, it's not serious enough, so people don't get upset about it, even though it's exactly the same thing, really."

Four-word film reviews. A little black book with more than 400 movie reviews has just come out, and the beauty of it is, the reviews are only four words long! Compiled from the Four Word Film Review website (www.fwfr.com), Four Word Film Reviews (Adams, $9.95) breaks the pictures down into categories (action, horror, classic) and offers succinct little synopses to set up the punny blurbs of four words (or less). Here are a few samples:

Titanic: "Sinking feelings split couple."

The Sixth Sense: "Small medium, large twist."

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: "Aliens cause mashed hysteria."

Up: "Inflation causes housing crisis."

Rosemary's Baby: "Housewife served deviled eggs."

Inglourious Basterds: "Bad spellers kill Nazis."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: "The Snape's of Wrath."