New film

"WHAT is it with this family? Do balls skip a generation?” complains Jacques Mesrine to his father before knocking over a whiskey bottle and storming out of his parents’ apartment. The impetuous Mesrine is no 15-year-old punk testing his father’s authority, but a 30-something former soldier with a nonspecific axe to grind and a talent for armed robbery. "Mesrine: Killer Instinct”, written and directed by Jean-François Richet, is the first half of a two-part film based on the life of Jacques Mesrine, a French career criminal who died in 1979. Vincent Cassel stars as Mesrine, a figure who combines a smart self-regard with an addiction to notoriety and a seemingly unmotivated blood lust. I do not think it is spoiling much to say that Mesrine desecrates corpses, bludgeons foes with a truncheon, sticks the barrel of a gun into his wife’s mouth, and stabs and buries a pimp alive. If “Bonnie and Clyde” wasn’t your thing, cross this one off the list.

The film calls itself both a thriller and a biopic, which means that it combines the suspense of the former with the meandering, messy qualities of biography (real lives seldom produce neat ironies or reversals). Mesrine zips in and out of jail, commits crimes when he feels like it (which is often) and dates a series of kittenish prostitutes who lick his neck or abet his robberies, depending on their affinities. With his black-button eyes, Cassel looks perpetually hung-over and on a low-grade stimulant. His charisma is immense and essential because Mesrine, as a character, is intensely boring. Ungoverned by any kind of code, his murders and sundry crimes proceed without reason. Unpredictability is interesting up until the point where it becomes random, and “Mesrine” crosses that line early on. Visually, the film recalls such cold mid-'70s thrillers as “The Conversation” or “Six Days of the Condor”, with their laconic leading men, eerie scores and a colour palettes tending toward ecru, mustard and mud tones.   

If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s Cassel, who more than compensates for the film’s narrative weakness. (His performance duly earned him a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar.) As Mesrine, he is stylish without being ridiculous, which is tricky when portraying a smooth Frenchman robbing a bank in a trench coat, say, or seducing a virginal Spanish beauty at the seashore. It would have been easy for Cassel to come off as a mincing cornball in these scenes, but instead he looks cool—really, enviably cool. He makes the gore and flaws of “Mesrine” worth it.

“Mesrine: Killer Instinct” is now out in select cinemas