Old Yorker

  • Mesrine:  Public Enemy No 1

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mesrine:  L’ennemi public no 1

    Jean-François Richet (2008)

    If you didn’t know the two films were released in the same year, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Public Enemy No 1 was a sequel made some years later – an attempt to rekindle the interest of the first film, Killer Instinct.  This second part of the Jacques Mesrine story has high-energy editing but is running on empty in terms of its subject’s character development.  Covering the last six years of Mesrine’s life (1973-79), it’s a bit longer than the first picture but it feels a lot longer.  Its first half is largely a series of heists and audacious exits and entrances.  Some of these are spectacular, as when Mesrine smuggles a gun – hidden for him above a toilet, as Michael Corleone’s gun was hidden, in The Godfather (recently rereleased) – into a court that’s about to pass sentence.  (Mesrine takes the judge hostage in order to make his getaway.)   The short scene in which Mesrine disguises himself as a doctor, in order to visit his dying father in hospital, stands out in a different way.  When he suddenly breaks down and says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ to his father, the effect is startling:  Mesrine’s proudly maintained public persona crumbles in a private moment with a parent.   For the most part, though, I found myself merely comparing the action sequences with each other – was the one I was watching more or less exciting than the one before? – in an almost abstract way.  There’s next to no context beyond what you supply yourself, from having seen Killer Instinct.

    The film picks up in its second hour:  in the description of Mesrine’s relationship with a young prostitute, Sylvia; in the uneasy alliance between him and another criminal, François Besse, with whom he’s made his latest prison break;  in the kidnap of Henri Lelièvre, a Rachman-like property owner in Paris.   By this stage, Mesrine is developing galloping pretentiousness:  he sees himself as a social revolutionary – a kindred spirit to the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigade in Italy.  Fired by the part he played in getting the SCU in Montreal closed down a few years previously, he talks of a mission to purge France of maximum security prisons.  He boasts that he’s an honourable and socially responsible criminal, who robs the rich and exploits no one.   He abuses Sylvia – physically as well as verbally – for flaunting herself in the presence of a man called Charly Bauer, whose criminal activities are more coherently politically motivated than Mesrine’s own.  Up to this point you assume that Sylvia has teamed up with Mesrine for entirely hedonistic reasons – sex and shopping.  When this very material and, it has seemed, thoughtless girl tells Mesrine, tearfully but matter of factly, that he’ll die alone, it comes as a jolt to the audience as well as to him.  Frustrated by Mesrine’s appetite for publicity as well as his messianic tendencies, Besse exasperatedly explains that he doesn’t want to destroy the system – he wants to continue to make a criminal living from it.

    The octogenarian Lelièvre – a ‘nasty old piece of filth’ as Mesrine, in planning his abduction, describes him – is too sharp for Mesrine.  Lelièvre is as weary as he is scared, and a natural pragmatist:  he scoffs at the ten million franc ransom – Mesrine’s opening bid – telling his kidnapper that he’s far too old to be worth that kind of money.   To Mesrine’s chagrin, Lelièvre also points out the similarities between them, the differences between a revolutionary and a professional criminal – and his certainty that Mesrine is therefore not a revolutionary.    This is all credible enough in psychological terms but there’s not much tension in these exchanges because Mesrine’s vainglory is shallow – he can be too easily deflated.  (The effect is similar when he’s infuriated by people pronouncing his surname wrong – ‘Mayreen – not Mesreen!’ as the subtitle has it.)

    This is Vincent Cassel’s Raging Bull:  he put on stones to play the older Mesrine and he carries the added weight convincingly.  As in Killer Instinct, Cassel is an utterly dominant presence but his professed contempt[1] for the man he’s playing, for all that it’s understandable, sometimes makes it hard to separate the empty man from a superficial interpretation of him.  Ludivine Sagnier’s supernal prettiness makes Sylvia’s apparent empty-headedness all the more startling:  when Sylvia develops a loyalty to Mesrine that she doesn’t seem quite to understand, it’s touching.  Mathieu Amalric is strong as Besse and Georges Wilson memorably exhausted and cynical as Lelièvre.   (Wilson, at eighty-seven, is five years older than Lelièvre is meant to be.)  The outstanding supporting performance comes from Olivier Gourmet, as Broussard, the police chief leading the hunt for Mesrine.  I’d seen Gourmet in films by the Dardenne brothers but he’s very different here:  he brings Broussard to life very believably – you see the man’s snagged, determined professionalism and how this shades into a macho anxiety not to be bested by Mesrine (Gourmet also suggests Broussard’s furtive admiration for l’ennemi public numero un).   There’s good work from Gérard Lanvin (as Bauer), Samuel Le Bihan (Michel Ardouin, another of Mesrine’s accomplices), Anne Consigny (Mesrine’s advocate), Hervé Laudière and Françoise Le Plénier (a farmer and his wife forced to drive Mesrine and Besse to safety), and Alain Fromager (as Jacques Dallier, an unpleasant right-wing journalist who still doesn’t deserve what he gets).

    Apart from the attempted murder of Dallier – who’s written a piece impugning Mesrine’s crook’s honour – there doesn’t seem to be as much violence in this film as in its other half.  (This may be an illusion – perhaps, after Killer Instinct, I went to Public Enemy No 1 primed to expect mayhem and, in effect, more inured to it.  Even so, the assault on Dallier was plenty.)  Jean-François Richet ends the picture with an account of Mesrine’s ‘assassination’ by Broussard’s men (which very nearly goes wrong), in the Place de Clignancourt in November 1979 – it’s eventually bloody, of course, but the build-up to the police’s opening fire is painstaking.  Once the killing has happened, Richet and the writer Abdel Raouf Dafri make their points crudely but forcefully.   Mesrine was avid for celebrity and he has died a public death – in the centre of Paris, in broad daylight, in front of crowds of people.  Although Sylvia predicted that he would die alone, he doesn’t – thanks to her presence in the passenger seat of his BMW (the hail of Paris police bullets naturally calls to mind the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde):  Mesrine has gone through a fair number of partners of different kinds in the course of the two films but Sylvia stays with him.  She survives the bullets, and we gather that the pet dog on her lap in the car does too.  In Killer Instinct, the French army in Algeria and the authorities at the Montreal maximum security prison were shown to have no more regard for human life and dignity than Mesrine:  after they’ve killed him, the police treat him not like a dog but as something inferior.   Broussard, ignoring Mesrine’s bleeding corpse for a moment, calls for someone to get the poodle to a vet.

    2 September 2009

     

    [1] See note on Mesrine: Killer Instinct.

  • Mesrine:  Killer Instinct

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mesrine:  L’instinct de mort

    Jean-François Richet (2008)

    Richet’s marathon account of the life of the French criminal Jacques Mesrine comprises two parts, of which this is the first.  The second – Mesrine:  Public Enemy Number One – will open in the UK at the end of the month.  Killer Instinct certainly compares well with Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.  Except for a disproportionately long sequence in the Archambault Maximum Security Prison (known as the SCU (Special Correctional Unit)) in Quebec, it’s fast paced and efficient.  Unlike Mann’s sluggish exercise in style, it has an exciting immediacy.  Vincent Cassel as Mesrine is charismatic and immensely self-confident.  The film is also superficial.   It’s not surprising that Killer Instinct is very violent but its shallowness makes the violence objectionable.

    In an early scene, Mesrine is a soldier in the French army in Algeria in 1959, taking part in the interrogation and torture of members of the Algerian National Liberation Front, and instructed by his superiors to shoot to kill.  (Even then, he doesn’t do exactly what he’s told.)  In solitary confinement in the SCU in the late 1960s, he’s subjected to relentless physical brutality and psychological cruelty by the prison authorities.  These sequences are obviously designed to show Mesrine on the receiving end of harmful treatment, by forces of military and civil law and order, that’s just as bad as anything he himself dispenses.  After his first spell in prison in France, he briefly goes straight before losing his job and returning to crime – so we also see him as prey to less aggressive but no less negative social forces.  All this naturally raises the question of how much Mesrine was shaped by these experiences.  It seems safe to assume that not all French soldiers who went through what he did in the Algerian war became homicidal gangsters after they left the army – so the brutalising effects of what we see at the start of the film can be no more than a partial explanation of Mesrine’s psychology and behaviour.  (It doesn’t, for example, account for his beating up his wife and other women.)  Yet Jean- François Richet and Abdel Raouf Dafri, with whom Richet adapted Mesrine’s autobiography, seem happy for the audience to read the-moral-of-the-story in the way an elderly man sitting just in front of me at the Curzon Soho did.  As the closing credits rolled, he said with satisfaction to his companion, ‘Yes – you see he was trained to carry out torture in war …’   Richet takes his opportunities to encourage this kind of response but he doesn’t otherwise explore Mesrine’s personality or motivation.

    Any self-respecting filmmaker is going to stage violent scenes with the maximum technical skill and aplomb.  He or she should be trying to do the same with any scene but violence has, to an unusual extent, an inherent capacity to affect an audience – both viscerally and by causing us to question its appearance in a picture.  I’m irritated when I hear people say righteously that they simply won’t tolerate violence on screen but I do think that, because of its intrinsic power, directors have a particular moral responsibility to justify their presentation of violence.  In Bonnie and Clyde, the shootings were orchestrated in a way that was integral to the filmmakers’ intention to make the audience think twice about its feelings for the criminals and the time and place in which their story was set.   In the Godfather films, killings were sometimes committed by characters about whom – although we realised their code of honour was perverted – we were ambivalent:  the tension between plausible cause and vicious effect was often overwhelming.  In Taxi Driver, the explosive, climactic bloodbath made powerful sense because it so aptly expressed the psychology of the protagonist:  we’d seen the shutting down of Travis Bickle’s options for ending his isolation, resentment and frustration (and because the violence had been held in check for most of the film it was hard not to experience it as to some extent cathartic).   The violence in Killer Instinct isn’t substantiated or warranted by this kind of complexity, nor is it in any way stylised or elliptical.  With very few exceptions (one, perhaps, is the late-on sequence in a Canadian forest, when Mesrine and his accomplice do shooting practice and, moments later, shoot for real), it has no more depth than the mayhem in a routine, mindless action picture.  Richet’s approach also means that, like the directors of that kind of film, he needs to keep upping the violent ante.

    There are plenty of talented people involved in Killer Instinct – Richet evidently among them – but I’m not convinced that it’s the quality of the film that has made it a respectable success (winner of three César awards this year, including Best Director and Best Actor).  It’s more to do with its being about a real man who, in France at least, is also a legend.  If the main character here were fictional, arthouse audiences would be less easily satisfied by the surface narrative and by those few, unsatisfactory pointers to Mesrine’s being formed by external forces and circumstances beyond his control.  Is Richet perhaps capitalising on Mesrine’s notoriety in his use of violence too?   After all, Mesrine, the year before his death in 1979, was not only public enemy number one but topped a national opinion poll as the most popular person in the country.  Is the dispassionate brutality in the film Richet’s way of saying, ‘This is your hero – this is what he really did’?  Legends at the end of Killer Instinct summarise what happened to the major characters, and to the notorious SCU, to which Mesrine and Jean-Paul Mercier (a Front de libération du Québec activist), having themselves escaped, returned to carry out a daring attack on the prison.   We’re told that shortly afterwards the SCU was closed down, never to reopen:  the implication is almost that Mesrine’s assault on it was humanitarian and there’s no evident irony in the implication.  In contrast, the concluding legend announces ‘And as for Jacques Mesrine himself … you’ll have to watch part two’ (or words to that effect):  the tone is roguishly tantalising.

    As that French poll indicates, many people are capable of curious warmth of feeling towards real-life criminals, on and off screen.  This extends, in this country anyway, beyond the Great Train Robbers like Biggs and Edwards to the Kray family; it appears to depend on the crime concerned being more or less organised crime and on the thugs being seen as stock – quasi-fictional – characters.  (Their thuggery becomes reassuringly generic; it eclipses an individual psychopathology which might be discomfiting.)  For people disposed to like this kind of lawbreaker and to enjoy watching him (or, much less likely, her) in action, the violence in Killer Instinct may be par for the course and untroubling; even if it is troubling to such viewers, it’s fair enough for Richet to exploit the double standard they’re applying.  But if you dislike this kind of thing, as I do, but still feel on Mesrine’s side occasionally, I’m not sure this betrays the basic ambivalence that Richet implies that he’s exposing.  It seems rather to show how primed we are to react in a certain way to types of film or film scene.  Killer Instinct is a biopic.  It’s about someone who made a name for himself in a particular walk of life; part of the essential appeal of the biopic genre is seeing the famous person attain celebrity and fight back when thwarted.  When Mesrine and Mercier are trying to escape from the SCU, we want them to succeed – that’s what you naturally want when the main characters in a film are trying to escape from captivity.  (We also know that, if they fail, they’re likely to be punished by their captors and, having already seen what happens to Mesrine in solitary confinement, it’s hardly surprising if we don’t want a second helping of that.)   Perhaps this means that, if our reactions are so programmed, regular filmgoers are, as a breed, morally defective.  It doesn’t mean that anyone rooting for Mesrine in the course of Killer Instinct is revealing an affinity with glamorous thugs.

    The phrase ‘glamorous thugs’ brings to mind a standard argument for deploring the Godfather films but rooting for Mesrine is very different from having mixed feelings about the Corleones, which result from their being such richly developed characters.  The longer Killer Instinct went on, the more I felt Mesrine was just not a very interesting person.  A quote from Vincent Cassel in a piece which appeared in The Times last month is striking:

    ‘Seven years ago, the film was in the hands of the director Barbet Schroeder, whose take was deemed too sympathetic to Mesrine. Cassel walked from the project. “The problem was they were presenting the guy as a hero, and what attracted me first about this whole venture was that everybody thought about this guy as a hero, and he wasn’t,” Cassel says. “If you take away all the racism, the misogyny, the unjustified violence, then you just have somebody that is not interesting.”’

    Cassel, a very different actor from his elegant father Jean-Pierre, certainly makes Mesrine a hollow man:  he’s startling because of Mesrine’s actions rather than what he suggests of the person behind those actions.  I would have been more impressed if I hadn’t found his acting in Eastern Promises (the only other performance I’ve so far seen from him) shallowly overwrought.  But Cassel is physically fearless and magnetic:  he completely owns the screen.  On his first night after his army discharge, Mesrine goes out with his friend Paul and they meet a couple of girls; Mesrine has sex with his in a strikingly businesslike way.   When he and Paul go on holiday to Spain, Cassel has a powerful aggressive charm on the dance floor, making a play for the Spanish girl who becomes his wife.  He also handles very well the moments when we see Mesrine’s quick wits getting him out of trouble – especially when he breaks into a Paris mansion with Paul and, surprised by the owners, explains that a burglary has occurred and that he and Paul are the policemen investigating it.

    The very strong cast includes Gérard Depardieu (as Guido, the senior thug who is Mesrine’s mentor), Gilles Delouche (Paul), Abdelhafid Metalsi (an Arab pimp, horribly murdered by Mesrine and Guido), Roy Dupuis (Mercier), Elena Anaya (Mesrine’s wife), and Cécile de France (his partner in crime and bed during his time in Canada).  Ludivine Sagnier makes a brief appearance, mostly in a short prologue to the main action of Killer Instinct (a prologue which I assume will continue as the conclusion to the second film).   Myriam Boyer and Michel Duchaussoy are particularly impressive as Mesrine’s parents.   You see from momentary eye contact at the family dinner table, on the evening of his release from the army, that mother and son share a contempt for the mild, benign father – and a conviction that Jacques is cut out for bigger things than the job in a lace-making business which his father has lined up for him.

    18 August 2009

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