Mesrine: Killer Instinct / Public Enemy

Through a haze of gun smoke and whisky fumes, women and blood, Jean-François Richet’s four-hour saga wades into the world of a gangster who always understood the power of publicity. Lethally seductive, irresistibly energetic and dangerously charismatic – Jacques Mesrine would be proud of the films that bear his name. But is that a blessing or a curse?

After being discharged from military service in Algeria, Mesrine spent 20 years robbing, murdering and kidnapping his way across France and Canada. He was Public Enemy Number One, ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, symbol of the New Wave’s Oedipal energy and the rage of the Soixante-huitaires.

We know this because he told us. Mesrine left behind a confessional, L’Instinct de Mort, in which he boasted about his life and crimes. That book is the basis for Richet’s two films. The first, Killer Instinct, details the origins of Mesrine’s criminal career – from Algeria to Paris, and a fateful meeting with mob boss Guido (Gérard Depardieu). After marriage, divorce and with a mistress (Cécile De France) in tow, Mesrine fled to Canada, where the brutal prison system re-moulded him into a new kind of killer. Public Enemy sees an older Mesrine with a new lover (Ludivine Sagnier), a new partner-in-crime (Mathieu Amalric), and an ever more reckless belief in his own hype.

He was Public Enemy Number One, ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, symbol of the New Wave’s Oedipal energy and the rage of the Soixante-huitaires.

For Richet, the question is how to balance that hype with reality – to find the line between the demands of cinema and the hard facts of life. Too smart to tell us that Killer Instinct and Public Enemy are based on a true story (indeed, in Public Enemy, we actually see Mesrine in prison printing his own legend. “People like pace and action,” he says. “You have to give them what they want.”), he opens each film with a title card: ‘No film can faithfully reproduce the complexity of a human life… To each his own point-of-view.’

And yet the director’s point-of-view is hard to decipher. Richet has given us pace and action aplenty, but in doing so has glibly subverted the foundation of the biopic – its claim to truth – as well as his responsibility as a writer to remain faithful to his material. So Killer Instinct and Public Enemy are… what? Based on true fictions?

Instead of analysis, we get shoot-outs, bank-jobs and prison breaks. Mesrine was, after all, nothing if not a man of action. His escape from Canada’s Special Correction Unit in Killer Instinct is a thriller masterclass – testament to Richet’s tight control. But however entertaining the film’s frequent set pieces are, the noisy cycle of crime/prison/escape eventually proves underwhelming.

Mesrine’s criminal career coincided with the birth of the New Wave, but there’s little of that electrifying innovation here. Richet has an episodic, TV sensibility; albeit one that is distinctly French. Rather than finding inspiration in Arthur Penn or Howard Hawks, he looks to the hard-nosed aesthetic of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker’s rugged policiers. But fussy split screens, sudden zooms and steadicam simply serve to soften the jagged edges of those classics.

Both films are at their best when they reach for something more – when the political undercurrents of this fascinating period bubble up to the surface. Killer Instinct begins with Mesrine’s violent death at the hands of armed police in 1979 – an incident that still divides opinion in France. But the inevitability of his death isn’t played as a Bonnie and Clyde-style morality tale. In the France that Mesrine knew – a murky swamp of radical politics, state-sponsored violence and underground gangs – guilt and innocence were moving targets. The questions is: who are the real criminals here?

Mesrine belonged to a generation of men haunted by the memory of Nazi occupation, and forged in the colonial killing fields of Algeria. This combustible mix of emasculation and violence – brilliantly captured in scenes that follow Mesrine from the execution of an FLN terrorist to the bourgeois gentility of a family dinner – produced an underclass of disenfranchised men whose despair and hatred, once unleashed, was eventually turned against the state that had exploited and encouraged it.

French radio may talk of a ‘new and modern Algeria’, but it also gave birth to a new and modern criminal: well armed, well trained and able to exploit the volatility of a Fourth Republic in its final throes. Far from accepting its complicity, however, that Republic fought back, displaying its hypocrisy by assuming extra-legal powers to stamp out the dissent it had created.

All that simmers in the background of Richet’s films – dark hints at a sinister history that might have made Mesrine’s story so much more than another gangster flick. But a number of explosive set-ups (most obviously Guido’s affiliation with a right-wing terror cell, and his subsequent murder by the police) fail to pay off. Having raised the spectre of a fresh new take on the genre, Richet suddenly backs away.

Perhaps the problem is Mesrine himself. “If I have to train with the Palestinians,” he tells a journalist in Public Enemy, “I will.” But he won’t. Mesrine may have moved fluidly through a world of revolutionaries, but he wasn’t one of them. He remained untouched by history. The Mesrine of Public Enemy isn’t a communist or a fascist but a narcissist – his violence an extension of his vanity.

And yet Richet doesn’t strip him completely of sympathy. There’s always an out for Mesrine – some excuse to justify his actions, whether the murder of two state troopers in Canada (self-defence), his anti-Arab racism (cultural training), or a brutal assault on his wife (loyalty to his friends). Contrast that with the withering reproach reserved for the head of the SCU, or the hypocrisy of the lawyers and judges threatened by Mesrine’s anarchic brand of self-expression. “There are rules!” shouts Mesrine after his daughter’s life is endangered by an attempted hit. A similar sentiment is conspicuously lacking from a mouthpiece of the state.

This, of course, is exactly the kind of revisionism that Mesrine would have loved. So too the films’ charismatic lead. Though surrounded by a glittering array of talent, Vincent Cassel dominates the frame, even as the thuggish shoulders of Killer Instinct slouch slowly into the middle aged spread of Public Enemy. This is a physical performance, jaunty and restless, his lips curled into a mocking half-smile/half-sneer – the expression of a casual, careless disregard for the world. Even buried beneath period wigs and 40 pounds of fat, there’s no mistaking Cassel’s undimmable star power.

Though never less than entertaining, Killer Instinct and Public Enemy can’t escape the shadow of the films they might have been. Both earn their place in the gangster canon. But not even Jacques Mesrine can escape the constraints of cinema.

Matt Bochenski

Anticipation:

Heavily nominated at France’s Césars, scooping awards for Best Actor and Best Director.

Enjoyment:

The pace doesn’t let up over four hours of action-packed cinema.

In Retrospect:

Richet’s approach to the material is questionable, limiting the ambition of his films to their epic length.