Long before Hollywood taught us not to expect anything original from modern screenwriters, a notion had formed that real life and personalities can be more vivid than any imagination. Perhaps the best example of this is the life and career of Eugène François Vidocq, a man who, at the end of his life, could boast of being a pioneer of scientific methods in the fight against crime, the founder and chief of the first modern criminal police force, and the founder of the first private detective agency in history. These achievements are even more impressive when you consider that Vidocq spent the first decades of his life on the other side of the law, earning a reputation as one of France's most notorious and wanted criminals, as well as an expert in prison escapes, before a death sentence in absentia and the ever-increasing statistical probability of meeting the guillotine forced him to change careers.
Vidocq achieved celebrity status during his lifetime and became an inspiration to numerous artists and writers, perhaps most famously Victor Hugo, who split his character in the famous novel Les Misérables into Jean Valjean and Javert, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, who based the character of C. Auguste Dupin, the first fictional detective in modern literature, on him. In the last hundred years or so, Vidocq's life has been the subject of numerous screen adaptations, among which the TV series starring Claude Brasseur probably stands out the most, while the eponymous 2001 feature film starring Gérard Depardieu was quickly and justifiably forgotten. The latest work, the biographical film L’Empereur de Paris (The Emperor of Paris), in which Vidocq is played by Vincent Cassel, appeared in 2018.
Interesting personalities like Vidocq usually step onto the historical stage in times that are "interesting" as in the famous Chinese curse, and the authors of this film remind viewers of this in introductory notes. The plot begins in 1805, sixteen years after the Revolution that caused a bloodbath, but also created a new order in which the hitherto poor and oppressed commoners, for the first time besides political and other rights, gained the opportunity to climb from the very bottom to the top of French society. Vidocq, who as a young soldier at the very beginning of the revolutionary wars defended the newly created Republic, did not fare well at first, and the political stabilisation under the newly proclaimed Emperor Napoleon finds him as a convict on the notorious prison-ship where his reputation as an escape master immediately earns the ire of the prison gang leader Maillard (Denis Lavant), who tries to eliminate him.
Because of this, Vidocq escapes together with fellow inmate Nathanaël de Wenger (August Diehl) and several years later, under a false name in Paris, tries to make a career as an honest merchant. He cannot, however, escape his past, is recognised, arrested and brought before police inspector Henry (Patrick Chesnais) who, to his horror, accuses him of a murder he did not commit. The rightfully offended Vidocq decides to prove his innocence and, in exchange for a temporary stay of execution, agrees to work as an informant. After he promptly delivered the real culprits, Henry is so impressed that he decides to permanently employ him to clean the streets of Paris of the most dangerous criminals. For this purpose, Vidocq assembles a small but efficient group of collaborators consisting of personalities of different social backgrounds and political views, whose skills come in handy when Vidocq once again faces Maillard, who, after his release from prison, created his own criminal empire.
The director is Jean-François Richet, a filmmaker for whom this is not the first film biography of a colourful personality from the French criminal underworld, and who is known for the epic two-part film Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, where the main protagonist, as here, was played by Vincent Cassel. Given this, as well as the budget of 22 million euros, fabulous by European standards, one might think that this would be an impressive achievement. And, at first glance, The Emperor of Paris does indeed look like a spectacular film in which not only a lot of money has been invested, but also a great deal of effort, most evident in the careful and detailed reconstruction of Paris from more than two centuries ago. This includes costumes, props, as well as various locations, from slum quarters, crowded markets and streets, all the way to imperial palaces.
The Emperor of Paris, however, shows far less effort put into the script. The fascinating story of Vidocq is thus reduced to a pile of clichés borrowed from countless Hollywood prison and gangster films, where the founder of modern forensics in the fight against crime uses much more down-to-earth methods akin to those used by Charles Bronson in the 1970s gritty action thrillers. Although Richet occasionally shows talent in scenes of armed confrontations, they mostly boil down to fairly quick and over time monotonous killings with a shot from a pistol to the head. Even the final scene, which takes place in the underground lair of the main Parisian gang, is somewhat disappointing, just as Vidocq's confrontation with the main antagonist is anticlimactic.
How clichéd the film is is best evidenced by the fact that even less experienced viewers will have no problem guessing the fate of Vidocq's collaborator and romantic partner, whose thankless role is played by Scottish actress Freya Mavor. More famous than her is Olga Kurylenko, whose role is a much better indicator of the film's shortcomings. Her character of a surviving aristocrat who manipulates the Parisian gangster scum and Napoleon's ministers with equal ease actually serves no purpose other than as an excuse to show Napoleonic-era dresses and carefully reconstructed locations. On the other hand, the character of Napoleon's Minister of the Interior Fouché, played by Fabrice Luchini, provides a very good historical context for the events surrounding Vidocq in a few short scenes, but is tragically underused.
The final scene, in which Vidocq passes dozens, then thousands of Napoleon's soldiers, is confusing and makes no sense, except perhaps as an effort to warm the hearts of the more fanatical Bonapartists among the target audience. In many respects, The Emperor of Paris, despite mostly good execution, seems conceptually flawed, or unfinished, so it is hard to avoid the impression that it is a slightly overstuffed pilot episode of a TV series that, unfortunately, will never be filmed.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version was posted here.)
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