Mesrine: L’Instinct de mort (2008) - film review

Serving in Algeria in the late 1950s, a young French soldier, Jacques Mesrine, soon develops a taste for violence, adventure and killing.  On his return to France, he is at a loose end, until he meets Guido, who introduces him to Paris’s notorious underworld.  In the years that followed, Mesrine would become the most celebrated criminal in France, thanks to an obsessive media interest in his exploits and the inability of the police to bring him to justice...

If he were here to see it, Jacques Mesrine would doubtless be delighted with the epic big budget diptych about his life that hit cinema screens in 2008 and 2009.  Yet again, the world is reminded of the outrageous criminal exploits that made this notorious gangster a media icon in the sixties and seventies.  You might ask why such an unsavoury individual deserves such attention, particularly as his story has already been committed to celluloid, in André Génovès’ 1984 film Mesrine and in the 2006 French TV movie La Chasse à l’homme (Mesrine).  Jacques Mesrine continues to exert a strange fascination over us since, as this latest film reveals, he was a man of great complexity and contradictions.  The mismatch between the gangster’s private and public persona is illustrated by the fact that journalists and broadcasters pronounced his name as Mess-reen whereas the correct pronunciation is Me(y)-reen. (which presumably poses a problem when you try to order the DVD of this film over the phone).

Over the past decade and a half, Vincent Cassel has earned a reputation as the new hard man of French cinema, in a series of films that go right back to Mathieu Kassovitz’s acclaimed urban drama La Haine (1995).  Consequently, he is perhaps the obvious choice to play the charismatic hoodlum Mesrine.  This could well be the role that defines the actor for the rest of his career – a dark, violent character motivated by an almost incontrollable inner hatred of the world, yet someone we can also identify and sympathise with.  More than anything, Vincent Cassel’s portrayal is what makes the film so compelling.  His Mesrine is as much a victim as he is a criminal, someone who could so easily have been the model citizen had circumstances been different, had the die been cast in his favour.

Whilst we may detest what Mesrine does, particularly the way he abuses women and those weaker than himself, it is hard to detest him as a man.  As the film’s opening title states, our judgement of someone is always a matter of perspective.  Director Jean-François Richet chose to portray Mesrine in a more sympathetic light than perhaps he deserves.  The danger of this is that, in some minds, the film may be seen to glamorise the kind of violent crime which Mesrine delighted in.

Whatever your views on the morality and politics of this film, it is hard to fault technically.  The action sequences are some of the most spectacular of any French film, staged, shot and edited with such frenetic energy and cold realism that the spectator is utterly gripped, shocking as the scenes may be.   Most impressive is the  almost painfully tense prison break-out scene, which is a master-class in suspense action-drama.  It is hard to believe that prior to this Richet had directed only four films, including just one action thriller (Assault on Precinct 13, 2005).   Here, he emerges as a supremely capable director of this genre of film, possibly the Sam Peckinpah or Martin Scorsese of French cinema.

Scriptwise, the film is somewhat less laudable.  Some of the dialogue is so bad that even actors of the calibre of Cassel and Depardieu have difficulty making the lines sound convincing.  All too common in action films, characterisation tends to be overlooked, and this happens to some extent in this film.  Whilst the action sequences are great, the more mundane, intimate scenes are less successful.  The characters have a tendency to talk and act in clichés, and therefore fail to come across as real human beings.  Even Vincent Cassel’s character is not immune from this, although such is the intensity and subtlety of the actor’s performance that he is proof against a few wobbly lines.  By contrast, the characters played by Gérard Depardieu and Cécile De France have a two-dimensional cartoon-feel, not because their performances are bad, but because their scripted characterisation is badly neglected.

Mesrine: L’Instinct de mort may have its shortcomings (the use of multiple screens, à la The Thomas Crown Affair, is a stylistic touch too far), but, on balance, it is an accomplished piece, arguably the most compelling and ambitious French gangster film in over a decade.  Despite its slow and floundering beginning, the film soon begins to exert a tight vice-like hold on the spectator through its sheer visual power, its relentless pace, and its overwhelming nihilist bleakness.  This is film noir for the 21st century.  If, having seen this first part of the Mesrine diptych, you ask yourself whether you should bother with the second part, the answer has to be a resounding yes.

© James Travers 2010

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