Few this side of the Channel have heard of Roberto Succo, but for 18 months this Italian-born robber and killer was France's public enemy number one.
Cédric Kahn's docudrama-style film doesn't glamorise him, but does something rarer. It contrasts two ways of thinking and acting. There's the instinctual and impulsive route taken by the deranged Succo through the towns and hinterland of the French Alps, eluding police ambushes, hitting victims at random, exhibiting a ruthlessness all the more fearsome because it is devoid of conscience or sense of consequence. And then there's the French police's text-book efforts to anticipate and trap him. These fail, because they rely on logic to read his mind and anticipate his actions - and logic is meaningless to a psychopath. The inherent contradiction in these two approaches provides the film's tension and texture: both engrossing.
Succo's victims are ordinary folk, often simply straying across his path. Only one of them is
examined for more than a happenstance value: Lea (Isild le Besco), an immature teenager whom he impresses with his flat-tering attentions, until she realises almost too late that he's not a manly lover but a lunatic with the mental outlook of a child. A Swiss schoolteacher who remains remarkably placid as Succo forces her at gunpoint to drive him through police road blocks remarks that she is quite used to dealing with children. The irony is lost on him.
Succo is played by an edgy non-professional, Stefano Cassetti, whose unfamiliar screen presence projects the frightening unpredictability of the original.
French and Italian police forces lobbied against this film, accusing it - unjustly, I feel - of slighting their dead comrades and aggrandising Succo's notoriety. Policemen who see it here will view it more dispassionately, I think, and I hope profit from its lesson that a rational system of detection makes a poor net in which to snare the irrational will of a public enemy.
Roberto Succo
Cert: cert15
