Last week, three months after the spectacular jewel heist at the Musée du Louvre, startling CCTV footage was aired on the investigative programme Complément d’Enquête on France Télévisions. The brief clip shows two thieves entering the museum’s Apollo Gallery with unhurried ease and, under the eyes of the staff, leaving again with the nation’s crown jewels.
The burglary has already prompted a flurry of references to classic caper fare: Entrapment, Lupin, and above all Ocean’s Eleven (and Twelve). Yet there is a fictional Louvre scene that is far more interesting — one that avoids the trap of romanticising crime, despite its romantic atmosphere. I am thinking of Theo, Isabelle and Matthew running through the museum in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers from 2003.
The three simultaneously naïve and disillusioned ’68ers are trying to beat the record set by their cinematic forebears in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964). Sliding across the polished wooden floors, just as in the black-and-white Nouvelle Vague classic, they race past Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784). As in Godard’s film, the contrast is arresting. In David’s monumental canvas, three brothers swear an oath to end the war between Rome and Alba Longa by defending Rome to the death – a vision of virtue that is also, at first glance, paradoxical: going to war to end war.
This uncompromising, principled idealism is typical of the early David, who later, during the French Revolution, turns into a fully-fledged dictator of the arts; a “terrorist”, as Jason Farago recently described him in the New York Times.
Bertolucci’s young record-breakers could hardly be further removed from such faith in heroic virtue.
Decades later, is this detached nihilism still the prevailing mood among people in their twenties, among Gen Z? Or are there, once again, Horatii to be found? In Ukraine, certainly. But in a post-heroic EU?
In the end, Theo, Isabelle and Matthew succeed. They break the record by a comfortable margin, clocking in at 9 minutes and 28 seconds.
The real Louvre heist reportedly lasted around eight minutes in total, with the thieves spending less than four minutes inside the museum.
Sometimes, however, it is about more than a record. Or about more than €88 million worth of loot.
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