Apaches: Gang of Paris

Apaches (2023) opens with a cockamamie sequence in which Billie (Chloé Peillex), a street urchin at the time, stabs Sarah Bernhardt (Rossy de Palma) in the thigh and steals a ruby- and diamond-encrusted necklace from the famous French stage actress, while her brother and fellow urchin sabotages the scaffoldings surrounding a Statue of Liberty-in-progress (the movie takes place in Paris in the late 19th century) as a diversion. As with the destruction of the second Death Star, no mention is made of the many innocent laborers who surely must have perished as a result of this domestic terrorist attack. Billie’s brother was killed when Jésus (Niels Schneider), leader of the Apaches gang, forced him to play Russian roulette. Billie attacked Jésus with a knife, giving him a nigh-imperceptible scar under his left eye. Jésus retaliated by pinning her brother’s death on Billie. Billie reemerges 15 years later, now played by Alice Isaaz and bent on going into the Revenge Business. This film’s problem, other than being the Euro Disney to Gangs of New York’s Disneyland, is that it talks business but it doesn’t mean business. The script lowers the bar considerably as to what Billie is willing to do for the sake of vengeance, only to abstain from having her limbo under it. Billie follows a row of working girls, purporting to be one of them, to the Apaches’ hangout. I was intrigued to see whether Billie would sleep her way through the Apaches’ hierarchy until she was finally able to get close enough to Jésus. That would have given Billie instant stone-cold cred — and why not? Having come of age behind bars, her only family long dead, it would stand to reason that Billie has been hardened to the point that she’s willing to do anything — or anyone — to avenge her brother and herself. Then again, you don’t have to actually whore Billie out. You could, however, at least milk the situation for whatever it’s worth. It’s like Syd Field wrote: “If you know your character’s dramatic need, you can create obstacles to it and then your story becomes your character, overcoming obstacle after obstacle to achieve his/her dramatic need.” Billie’s dramatic need is to get back at Jésus. Pretending to be a prostitute overcomes one obstacle — how to approach the gang without raising suspicion — while at the same time potentially creating another; i.e., how to keep up the façade without Billie actually soiling her virtue (sort of like how undercover cops in movies usually, though not always, find ways to avoid engaging in criminal activities). It’s a viable storytelling avenue, albeit not one that co-writer/director Romain Quirot had any interest in. Overall, it could be argued that Quirot wasn’t interested in what his film was supposed to be about. There was indeed one, or rather several, Apaches gangs in turn-of-the-century Paris, of which Quirot has certainly heard about, though something tells me failed to do his homework. Consider, to name but one example, the infamous “Apache revolver”: an infernal Swiss Army knife of a weapon — consisting of a barrel-less pinfire pistol, fold-over brass knuckles as a grip, and a foldout double-edged blade — that is conspicuously absent from this movie. How could you look at it and not think that it would make the coolest prop? Unless you neglected to properly research the subject matter. Of course, the anachronistic soundtrack (including but not limited to The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be You Dog”) and the garish, synthetic Moulin Rouge-esque aesthetic tell you all you need to know about how seriously Quirot took the whole endeavor — and perhaps the audience isn’t meant to make a big deal out of it either. It all goes back to the beginning, which in its farfetchedness precludes the possibility that anything that happens does so in earnest. At the same time, and in stark contrast to its gaudy exterior and cavalier attitude, Apaches suffers from a terminal lack of joie de vivre (substituting instead the characters’ schadenfreude at their hapless victims), and that’s nothing short of a dealbreaker for a story ostensibly set during the Belle Époque.