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