The film opens with a statement from the filmmakers, acknowledging that any adaptation of a real life story will take some liberties and make changes. "To each their own," it declares, letting its audience know right from the off that while the film we are about to see may not be 100% accurate, any changes are all for the greater good of the drama.
Suffice to say that it works. L'INSTINCT DE MORT is one of the finest gangster films to be released in years. It is violent, exciting, sexy, funny, captures the mood and the fashion of the time, while presenting a central character, Jacques Mesrine, who is at once charismatic, unpredictable and completely terrifying.
Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) returns home from a stint serving in Algeria and fails to reintegrate into normal life. He rejects the steady job he has been offered, clashes with his shy and retiring parents and quickly falls in with old friend Paul (Gilles Lelouche) and local gangster, Guido (a huge Gerard Depardieu). A smooth-talking ladies man with a hair-trigger temper, Mesrine quickly makes a name for himself as a hoodlum and bank robber. Together with Paul and Guido, they pull in the cash, make friends and enemies all over town and Mesrine finds himself in jail on a number of occasions.
Always acting on impulse, Mesrine marries Sofia (Elena Anaya), a young Spanish beauty he meets on holiday, but she grows increasingly uneasy with his lifestyle and after threatening to call the police, he brutally terrorizes her to the point that she leaves, abandoning their three children in the process. But women are never hard to come by and soon enough he has teamed up with Jeanne (Cecile De France), who is more than happy to get her hands dirty alongside her man. Mesrine's notoriety continues to grow, within criminal circles, with the authorities and also the general public. After a botched kidnapping sees him and Jeanne flee to Montreal, where he continues his criminal activities, Mesrine eventually obtains the title Public Enemy No.1 - and he loves it.
The film is wonderfully stylish, capturing the gritty feel of the period perfectly, while staging some truly thrilling robberies, heists and a completely audacious jailbreak. But as assured as Jean-Francois Richet's direction is, this is a film that lives or dies on its central performance, and Vincent Cassel is nothing short of remarkable. Appearing in every scene, Cassel has created a true movie monster. Disarmingly charming one minute, totally horrifying the next, Mesrine is a man rife with contradiction, double standards and a skewed moral code who is unnervingly unpredictable, whilst being strangely seductive.
But there is able support throughout from Depardieu, Lelouche and Roy Dupuis as his partner-in-crime in Montreal, Jean-Paul Mercier. Cecile De France and Elena Anaya both do fine jobs as the women in Mesrine's life, not only believably loving such a dangerous man, but also convincing us that Mesrine could fall for them too. Brilliantly paced and almost faultless in execution, it is hard to find anything wrong with the film, save only for the fact that it ends with so much of the story still left to tell. Fortunately it was shot back-to-back with PART 2 - L'ENNEMI PUBLIC NO.1, which is screening this Wednesday. I can't wait.