La Mentale (2002)
Directed by Manuel Boursinhac

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.