Lacenaire is well known of the French audience.He is featured in the most famous movie of our whole cinema "les enfants du paradis ".Marcel Carné's magnum opus masterfully mixed real life characters (Baptiste Debureau,Lacenaire and even Avril) and fictional ones (Garance,Montray).Francis Girod's style does not look like Carne's to the slightest extent,but it includes some nods to the great ancestor: the carnival for instance .
Girod loves the unconventional figures:in "le trio infernal" he made delicate Romy Schneider an awful criminal.In "la banquière" he made the same actress a bisexual Robin Hood of the finance.In that later film,he showed his limits however.He invented the character (supposedly a real life one) almost as much Arthur Penn did with Bonnie and Clyde.
Ditto for "Lacenaire" , a movie which wants us to side with the hero.Lacenaire might have been an anarchist but he was a criminal too.He might have been an educated man (you may remember how Bob Dylan praised gangster Joey Gallo -"Desire" album- just because he used to read Nietzsche in jail),poisoned with religion and a bourgeois family,he remains in the end nothing but a murderer:there's a tendency to forgive the worst of criminals when they have a high IQ (see also for that matter Frankenheimer's "the young savages")The movie is a long flashback ,based on Lacenaire's memoirs .There's the obligatory trial where Daniel Auteuil can play his "hero of the people" part .There's the obligatory gay character.There's the obligatory guillotine scene.It's finally a politically correct movie (= made to please you ,nineties viewer) Lacenaire should never have left the children of the paradise.
