TRAILERS are all well and good, but few filmmakers will ever get a publicity campaign like this one: The jewel robbers known as the Pink Panthers may have staged one of history’s most spectacular heists — $136 million worth from Cannes’ fabled Carlton Hotel — the very week that Havana Marking’s documentary about the gang hits theaters.
If the Panthers are behind this robbery, would the synergy amuse them? Oh, definitely. Marking’s film shows the Panthers, a loosely affiliated group of more than 200 people who hail from the former Yugoslavia, as the most flamboyant gang this side of “The Italian Job.”
Marking’s coup was in getting some Panthers to talk to her, including a beautiful woman (“Lela”) who cases the joints disguised as a customer, and a man (“Mike”) who actually carries out robberies. Their statements are read by actors, and the actors are then rendered in rather “Miami Vice”-ish animation.
The cops and others in hot pursuit play themselves with an equal sense of drama; Chief Inspector Yan Glassey of Switzerland has a stuffed Pink Panther dangling from his ceiling by a noose.
The movie’s most exciting when the precision and jaw-dropping nerve of the gang holds center stage. It opens with security footage from the 2007 robbery of a jewelry store in Dubai. Two sports cars crash through glass and barriers, masked men wave guns and clean out cases, then poof! they are gone.
Mike and Lela mostly discuss the job of which he’s most proud, a heist in Spain that took months to set up and required Lela’s seducing the poor sap who owned the store next door to the target. They staged the robbery to coincide with a religious festival; unable to open the safe on premises, the thieves shoved it in the van and drove off while revelers danced in the streets. If Brian De Palma staged this, people would chide him for lack of plausibility.
The film sags midway with a digression about how Yugoslavia’s ghastly civil war in the 1990s produced ideal conditions for border-hopping crime. Criminals who came from happy families in prosperous, stable circumstances — now that would be different. The sociology is less interesting than the robberies and the Panthers’ near-folk-hero status.
Milena Miletic, a journalist who’s been tracking the gang on their home turf in Serbia, is blunt about their appeal to ordinary folks: “Bravo, you robbed the bigger criminals,” is how she sums up reactions. But while she and the cops sometimes chuckle in exasperated admiration, Glassey points out that the Panthers are not Robin Hood. They don’t go to Kosovo and build a foundling hospital with their ill-gotten gains.
Nor are they infallible. The Dubai robbery was undone by startlingly boneheaded mistakes, and Glassey says that since 2007 at least 50 Panthers have wound up in jail. Now some have escaped, and their misdeeds appear to continue. This group won’t leave the stage until the curtain’s rung down on them by force. Meanwhile, Marking’s record of the Pink Panthers’ exploits practically invites you to play casting director for the big-budget heist saga to come.