CRIMINAL MINDED

Mesrine? Mais oui!

GANGSTER NO 1

Thanks to the minor modern deity that is – cue corporate plug – Orange Wednesdays, I whiled away the other afternoon in the engaging company of Jacques Mesrine. More specifically, I caught Public Enemy No 1, the second part of Jean Francois Richet’s four-hour plus Mesrine biopic, and a welcome addition to the upper echelon of gangster greats – a list that’s been achingly predictable and oddly static for a while, though any worth its salt should also reserve space for Matteo Garrone’s organised crime classic Gomorra.

PULP FICTION?

As with its first instalment, Killer Instinct, the entire plot of Mesrine would be dismissed as fantastically loony and implausible were it cooked up by some fledgling screenwriter or, come to that, the increasingly wayward Tarantino. Yet to all intents it’s predicated on real facts, if possibly muddied by Mesrine’s pumped-up and unreliable prison-written memoir L'Instinct de Mort. Yet even without the big screen treatment (see also André Génovès 1984 flick Mesrine) or its author’s attuned grasp of poetic license, Mesrine led an extraordinary life of crime.

THE UNTOUCHABLE

After busting his first cap while serving for the French Army in the Algerian war (a pivotal scene in the first film), he embarked on a concentrated criminal career that witnessed him rob countless banks (often two in the same day), take a judge hostage, escape prison repeatedly, lead a failed jailbreak, smuggle arms, kidnap millionaire Henri Lelièvre for a tidy six million Francs, amassing a double-score body count along the way. A busy shopper at his local toupee purveyors, Mesrine was able to move around France and abroad unmolested, earning the affectionate sobriquet ‘The Man of 1,000 Faces’.

Yet while the details are ably and stylistically intact, Public Enemy No 1 is much darker than its predecessor. Perhaps because the Mesrine modus operandi is so well established – he knows, as do we, that his time in any maximum-security facility is limited – thoughts inevitably turn to the cumulative weight of his crimes and the psychological bounty that his newfound fame and notoriety extracts from him.

THE PAYBACK

As he ages Mesrine is increasingly seduced, even addicted, to his public image – at one point asking his jailor who Pinochet is, aghast that he’s been relegated from the main newspaper headline – and strives to keep brand Mesrine a going concern, selling increasingly inflammatory interviews to the likes of Paris Match and likening himself to a modern revolutionary. As his ego bloats to mirror his generously capacious frame – fame, it seems, has turned him into something of a gourmand – the film reaches its tipping point when derogatory comments from journalist Jacques Tillier in the far-right newspaper Minute lead him to exact a brutal, bone-chilling revenge.

This transgression from charming, bank-robbing bon vivant to cold-blooded psychotic egotist is Mesrine’s dark heart, and recalibrates emotions for the film’s beautifully staged ending – the subject’s prediction of his own demise proving unerring.

GOODFELLA

More than anything, this exhausting watch is made compelling thanks to a bravura central performance from Vincent Cassel. In frame for virtually every second he imbues Mesrine with a winning mix of charm, personality and largesse, willing the audience to root for him despite the regular acts of violence he perpetrates against both his foes and the women he’s ably seduced. It’s a career-defining performance, Cassel even bulking-up Raging Bull style for his grand finale.

Seasoned Cassel admirers will be far from surprised. Like many I first caught him in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine in 1995, playing the troubled Vinz with acute sympathy during a pivotal time in hip-hop’s hostile take over of the French popular music market. And while his turns in L’Appartement, Doberman and Le Pacte des Loups are equally accomplished, none more reluctantly tugs on the memory than his role as the avenging boyfriend in Gaspar Noé’s harrowing rape drama Irréversible (you can sidestep a long dark night of the soul by listening to Cassel’s humorous account of its genesis here). 

Yet whatever he turns his talents to next, Cassel will have to go some to top Mesrine as his masterpiece.