Vincent Cassel made his breakthrough as furious teenager Vinz in La Haine (1995), and ever since, he has played raffish criminals with particular glee, from Nicole Kidman's evil boyfriend in Birthday Girl to master thief "the Night Fox" in the Ocean franchise and Eastern Promises's decidedly less-than-master thief Kirill. Evidently, nonchalant lawbreaking goes well with Cassel's brand of Gallic swagger. But all the other crooks and bandits in Cassel's career were just a prelude to Jacques Mesrine.
From the early sixtes until his violent death in 1979, Jacques Mesrine committed a series of spectacular bank robberies, kidnappings, and implausible escapes from high security prisons. Based on Mesrine's autobiography with a script by Abdel Raouf Dafri and an a-list ensemble of French stars, director Jean-François Richet turned Mesrine's life into a two part biopic that gives Cassel four hours to explore the legendary criminal's deadly mixture of greed, charm, and murderousness. It's a perfect role for Cassel, and together, the two parts of Mesrine --
L'Instinct de mort and
L'Ennemi public n°1 -- make one fiendishly entertaining movie.
We first meet Jacques Mesrine (the "s" is silent) as a returning veteran from the war in Algeria. At his mother's behest, his father finds him a job, but Mesrine is more intrigued by the "off the books work" his friend Paul (Gilles Lellouche) does for local crime boss Guido (Gerard Depardieu) -- and the lifestyle it affords: poker parties, prostitutes, convertibles. A few bald-faced burglaries and pimp smackdowns later, Mesrine finds himself married, wealthy, and in jail. Not long after after his release, his wife Sofia (Elena Anaya) leaves him with their three children, and Mesrine takes up with Jeanne Schneider (Cecile De France), a gun-totin' gangster's moll that spurs him to ever more daring heists, including his trademark two-banks-at-a-time robberies.
Richet tells Mesrine's increasingly incredible story in bold, vivid strokes that accrue complexity without ever seeming to slow down. It's probably inevitable that
Mesrine will be compared to that other epic two-part biopic about a man determined to tear down the system by force, Steven Soderbergh's brilliant
Che. But apart from the run time, great lead performances, and some pretty crazy beards, the two films don't have much in common. Che uses a seemingly objective distance to draw its portrait of the Argentine revolutionary, but
Mesrine is every bit as greedy for attention as its main character: break-ins, break-outs, drive-bys, shoot-outs, road blocks, hostage situations, and kidnappings occur in such number and frequency that it's impossible to sneak to the bathroom without missing at least one felony and a bullet wound.
And then there's the women, the shifty sidekicks, and the ever-changing vintage disguises. In the second half, Ludivine Sagnier becomes Mesrine's fearless companion, and Mathieu Amalric helps plot his most audacious prison break yet. The wealth of incident and character is exhilarating, and in Cassel's performance, it's clear that Mesrine himself is intoxicated with his own recklessness. "Nothing is obligatory!" he shouts at his father, who collaborated with the Nazis. "Do balls skip a generation?"
Mesrine toys with the police, launches a frontal attack on a high-security prison, and feeds his hostages rabbit. In interviews with the press, he gestures in the direction of a revolutionary agenda -- these are the days of Baader-Meinhof and Aldo Moro -- but it's all bluster: Mesrine loves the thrills even more than the fame and money they earn him, and he has no illusions where it will all end. He's the most audacious Frenchman at the movies since Philippe Petit, but Richet doesn't let Mesrine get away with his self-mythologizing. For every grandstanding court room performance in which he tries to present himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, there's a sobering scene in which Mesrine exacts an ugly, violent revenge. The film accounts for Mesrine's undeniably seductive combination of charm and threat, but it won't let us forget that this fascinating man was capable of shocking cruelty.
