L'Élégant Criminel

1990 [FRENCH]

Action / Biography / Crime / Drama

4
IMDb Rating 6.1/10 10 377 377

Plot summary

On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.

Director

Top cast

Maïwenn as Hermine
Daniel Auteuil as Pierre-François Lacenaire
Yves Dangerfield as Docteur Brianchon
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
1.13 GB
1280*766
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  hr  cz  dk  nl  fr  gr  hu  pt  ro  ru  es  
24 fps
2 hr 5 min
Seeds ...
2.09 GB
1792*1072
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  hr  cz  dk  nl  fr  gr  hu  pt  ro  ru  es  
24 fps
2 hr 5 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by dbdumonteil

Un Infant du paradis

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.
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Reviewed by mjneu59 7 / 10

a hard sell on this side of the Atlantic

The improbable hero of this unusual French import is Pierre Lacenaire, a gentleman scoundrel whose flamboyant manner, articulate wit, and polite but profound contempt for a society he found hypocritical earned him many admirers, including the police detective responsible for sending him to the guillotine in 1836. The film might have been a leisurely, lightweight period comedy with little relevance outside its native country were it not for the eccentric (and sometimes dangerous) charm of its protagonist, shown arguing the case against himself with crowd pleasing panache during the final, farcical courtroom trial, demanding a death sentence to secure his own immortality. The film itself is equally playful and unpredictable, camouflaging its modest budget behind a curious leapfrog structure and several unexpected gestures too surprising not to be true. If Lacenaire were alive today he would likely regard it as the fulfillment of a dream come true: to see his entire life transformed into theatre.

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