It’s easy to see why writer/director Jean-François Richet thought Jacques Mesrine’s life story was ripe for cinematic treatment: 32 bank robberies, 4 prison escapes, and shot to death by a dedicated task force in the streets of Paris. He was in the papers constantly, writing letters to the press, doing photo shoots, and, later in his career, espousing a chameleon political agenda that journalists ate up. Indeed, Mesrine was one of the western world’s most notorious criminals, the less wholesome side of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.
Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the first of two films covering the adult life of Mesrine starts with his death, establishing itself quickly as a more personal film. Richet drives this home in the opening credits with a title card that says, “All films are part fiction. No film can recreate the complexity of a human life, each with its own point of view.” Of course, that doesn’t mean Richet doesn’t try. This is a film about these very complexities, which are brought to life by actor Vincent Cassel’s fantastic performance as Mesrine. (It’s no wonder he earned the César for best actor; he is perfect nearly every step of the way.) But it’s this emphasis on complexity, communicated through script and mise-en-scene, that makes Cassel’s Mesrine so penetrating on film in the first place.
The film opens with Mesrine in disguise slowly inching his way out of a hotel — checking around every corner, looking over his shoulder — with his current love interest Sylvie (Ludivine Sagnier) leading a half block in front to give the okay to proceed. Every movement in the scene feels deliberate, and yet their slow progression through the streets of Paris only takes up a small portion of the screen. It’s a screen within a screen, a distancing from reality that gives the impression that you aren’t seeing the whole picture. More tiny screens appear revealing the action from other angles, but they’re not synchronized and the timing is off: Mesrine takes off his glasses in one scene, while he still has them on searching over his shoulder in another. The camera angles are askew, jarring. It’s a reoccurring device that later involves Mesrine sizing up the situations through mirrors or windows. When things are at their worst, director of photography Robert Gantz reminds you that we are seeing a skewed vision of the man, a frame within a frame. A visualization of Mesrine’s nickname, “the man of a thousand faces.”
Despite the continuity between a character based story, wonderful performances, and loaded frames, the pacing betrays the films desire to toe the line between the more character-driven structure of biopics and the plot-driven structure of thrillers. The film moves rapidly through Mesrine’s life: enlisting in the military in Algeria, entering the world of crime, having kids, getting married, getting divorced, fleeing to Canada. While film never builds up to shootouts, robberies, or battles with his wife Sofia (Elena Anaya), it does want these moments of traditional biopic narrative to be thrilling in order to play up the heist and the excitement. We are dropped into these situations like paratroopers, with only a vague notion of what might be below, but enveloped in the action.
Where most directors of thrillers allow character to fall by the wayside, Richet is able to develop the characters under these quick-fire conditions with ease. The film is in constant motion, until the end where the pace slows and you see Mesrine develop an escape from a Canadian prison, the only time in the film where he’s present in a plan from conception to actualization. At this point, Mesrine has been labeled “Public Enemy No. 1” in Canada and is relishing his newfound fame. Mesrine comes to life in a new way here. He seems uninhibited while incarcerated, exhibiting a boyish desire for fame that was only hinted at earlier, freeing him to think bigger than he ever has before. The film ends with his escape and his return to the prison two days later in a failed attempt to free all the prisoners. Here, a shift has occurred, a satisfying evolution of character that, despite two hours of fast-paced action, keeps Mesrine surprising right up until the end of part one.