Ten years ago, Mélanie Laurent read a book about Bruno Sulak – a real-life Arsène Lupin known as the “gentleman burglar” because of his lack of violence and charming interactions with his victims. During the 1980s, Sulak carried out 19 sensational holdups of posh jewellery shops in Paris and on the French Riviera, all without firing a gun. He evaded police for years until his eventual capture that preceded his death in 1985. Now, the actor-turned-filmmaker Laurent is reviving Sulak for her latest feature, titled Freedom, with a perhaps unlikely lead: Emily in Paris heartthrob Lucas Bravo. Netflix’s global hit, in which Bravo plays Lily Collins’s dashing on-off chef squeeze, wasn’t the reason, though, she insists. “I’ve never seen his show,” she says. “I met him at a dinner and I didn’t even know who he was.”
Speaking over Zoom from a press junket in Paris, the 41-year-old Laurent – who shot to fame as the vengeful Jew Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) – wonders why we are obsessed with telling the stories of violent criminals and never characters like Sulak. “When someone is an anarchist, someone searching for freedom more than blood, who doesn’t use violence, has a beautiful love story, treats women well, who’s smart, charming, creative… It’s funny that we forgot about that one and we remember the bad ones. All those guys in the Eighties who had so much blood on their hands and never respected any women around them. We made biopics about those guys.” Notorious murderers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, have been alarmingly ubiquitous on screen. She nods. “How many documentaries about serial killers do we need?”
