It was the time of cops in sideburns, sideburns and guns tucked into their belts. That of repeated robberies, too: several dozen per week, in Paris alone. In the 1970s and 1980s, faced with the recurrence of armed robberies, the public authorities believed they had a three-letter answer: BRI, for research and intervention brigade. The press preferred the nickname “anti-gang”, under which this elite service will go down in posterity.
In eight thrilling parts which give voice to former police officers of this unit, but also to former gangsters, victims, hostages of the Bataclan, director Emmanuel Hamon (Exfiltrés, in 2019) revisits an epic punctuated by cases significant criminal events, from the kidnapping of Baron Empain in 1978 to the intervention at the Bataclan in 2015, including the death of “public enemy number 1” Jacques Mesrine, shot dead with an assault rifle, Porte de Clignancourt, in Paris, in 1979.
Bloody corpses filmed lying on the asphalt, handcuffed thugs with cigarettes in their mouths, robbers in balaclavas parading under the lens of the cameras: here, no hagiographic commentary or spectacular chases, even if the abundant archive sequences – supplemented by magnificent animations – provide their share of striking images.
“A little twisted and perverse side”
These police officers, interviewed without artifice or effects, in full frame, with their crude words and the freedom of tone conferred by an already long-standing retirement, are suited to a plunge into the heart of darkness. Defenders of the widow and the orphan, these fellows – all men, reflections of an era? Not a single one of them even pretends to claim it. “It wasn’t really my thing,” confesses François Antona, a BRI figure. My main goal was to go out and hunt. » A “sport (…) with a little twisted and perverse side”, adds Jo Querry, another BRI legend.
Almost all of them claim their attraction to the margins, at the risk of sometimes crossing the line of legality. At the time, remembers Jean-Bernard Vincent, a cop who became a journalist and writer under the pseudonym Eric Yung, “the police profession is a virus (…). We don’t follow the rules of society (…), we live in disorder all the time.”
By interviewing these “dense and romantic characters”, Emmanuel Hamon confesses “having had, at times, the feeling of being dealing with a gang more than a police brigade”. “Cowboys,” says the wife of a banker taken hostage in the 1980s. With their deep, calm voice, their silences conveying fifty shades of threat, these police officers say everything about another time, but at less do they say it, in a statement stripped of the elements of language distilled, today, into ministerial newspeak by appointed communicators.
For Alain Hamon (no relation to the director), former reporter at RTL, the golden age of the BRI was also “an era of blunders”. The black legend is embodied in the episode of the shooting at the Thélème bar, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, in February 1975: a summit of thugocracy supposed to put an end to a clan war between the Jewish and Sicilian godfathers. Results of the anti-gang intervention: two dead, four injured, including a police officer, and accusations of racism.
Untouchables
But the police officers, under the effect of a permanent “adrenaline rush”, also demonstrate extraordinary physical courage and pay a heavy price for their commitment. Their results will make them the darlings of power and the police headquarters. Untouchables.
One of the merits of this series also consists of questioning the evolution of a society through that of police methods and… the practices of thugs. At the turn of the 1990s, banks became more secure, thugs resorted to kidnapping against ransom demands, the BIS had to reinvent itself at the cost of trial and error – and new deadly shootings.
However, it was in the 2000s that the profession changed for good. Here comes the era of beacons and cell phones, armored intervention trucks, black overalls. “We are turning into Robocop,” says Georges Salinas, former number 2 of the BRI. The brigade’s missions change as the danger of Islamist terrorism looms.
The last episode of the series is, logically, devoted to the Bataclan massacre, relived practically second by second thanks to the nervous montage of first-hand testimonies, those of three hostages, a hooded BRI operator and Salinas. Heartbreaking moments during which the cacophony of hundreds of telephone calls punctuates the end of the hostage-taking and the neutralization of the attackers, when “Dad” and “Mom” appear on the screens of the victims’ cell phones. A way of reminding us that, behind the shields and under the helmets, police officers face daily danger, fear and death.
