On Movies: Cassel's inside story on Mesrine's death

One day when Vincent Cassel was 12, his younger brother returned home late from a soccer match at his Paris school, all abuzz. He and his classmates had been stopped on the street by police and told to get down on the sidewalk. They heard gunshots around the corner at the Porte de Clignancourt, where, the brother excitedly recounted, the police had just killed "a very famous gangster."

That was Jacques Mesrine, the notorious French criminal whose audacious run of killings, kidnappings, armed robberies, break-ins, and prison breakouts made him a familiar face (in various disguises) on newspapers and TV. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mesrine was as (in)famous in France as Dillinger or Scarface were during their Most Wanted days here.

Now, Cassel, thirtysome years later, stars in not one but two epics about the Gallic bad guy: Mesrine: Part 1 - Killer Instinct, playing at the Ritz Five, and Mesrine: Part 2 - Public Enemy, opening Friday. Both were directed by Jean-François Richet. The films, which together took close to a year to make, take the viewer through three decades of Mesrine's life. And they required Cassel to gain major poundage to resemble the paunchy, middle-aged hood shot and killed in November 1979.

In fact, Killer Instinct begins with that deadly fusillade on the street in the Cassel family's neighborhood, when a truckload of French police marksmen blocked Mesrine's BMW at a stoplight and opened fire.

"But you see, I have that story about my brother coming home, and everybody in France has at least one story about Mesrine," Cassel says. "It's like, 'Oh, I knew his sister,' or 'I knew a girl who was going out with him when he was going to summer camp,' or 'We could see him in the cafe drinking coffee while he was wanted by everybody.' . . .

"And it's not like he's a wonderful historical character, not like he's Napoleon. . . . But through him, we get this snapshot of France and what it was like then."

Cassel, wiry and intense, blazed onto the scene with the controversial La Haine in 1995 and incited more critical clamor with the long and graphic rape scene in 2002's Irreversible (with Monica Bellucci, to whom he has been married since 1999). He appeared in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen and in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.