Part 1 showing between Friday 7th and Thursday 20th August 2009 @ Watershed, Bristol
Part 2 showing between Friday 28th August and Thursday 10th September 2009 @ Watershed, Bristol

Jacques Mesrine was a notorious French gangster in the 1970s and, as has become the staple with any famous criminal, here we have the biopic based on his autobiographical manuscripts and it is being hailed as “the French Scarface”.

Mesrine’s story is a long one – the trailer exciting tells us he robbed 32 banks, broke out of 4 high security prisons and killed countless people – and so the biopic has been sliced down the middle into two chunky, suitable epic parts. While each movie is undoubtedly well directed and excellently acted, there is a strong element of repetition. Far from documenting different elements or perspectives of his life, Mesrine: Part 1 and Part 2 are tediously similar, he’s just a lot fatter and hairier in the second: he robs banks, he goes to prison, he escapes prison, he runs, he sleeps around, he kidnaps a millionaire, he goes to prison…and amongst it all we are thrown odd scenes of extreme violence and tender emotion. Apart from documenting his crimes, the only other angle the films explore is his obsession with the media. The films begin and end with a marathon scene of Mesrine finally being caught for good by the Paris police and while it bookmarks the films nicely, it underlines the lack of journey the audience really go on.

His story itself is not a very original one for a film and so you look for that little extra, something more to set it apart. Maybe the truth is however, that though his criminal CV is undoubtedly impressive, Mesrine the man just wasn’t that interesting. As becomes abundantly clear in the films, Mesrine had no idea what he was fighting for; he talks about revolution but is ultimately selfish in his motivations, just wanting to be famous, respected and remembered, and although the films highlight this, they explore it no further. Yes the bank heist scenes are exciting, but when you know he’s only robbing them because he can, by the fifth or sixth heist, the novelty has worn off.

Personally, it would have been infinitely more interesting to explore Mesrine’s head rather than his exploits. Perhaps we could have investigated his obvious, psychotic and insane tendencies; he beats a reported to death just for writing a bad story about him and at one point returns to a prison only weeks after breaking out armed to the teeth to try and break his former inmates out! Similarly, we have a taster of his past at the very beginning of Part 1 with some traumatic scenes from the 1960s Algerian War, pointing possibly to where it all started to go wrong for Mesrine, but the scene is little more than a minute long.

Ultimately the Mesrine films are slick, sexy and explosive, with a superb performance by Vincent Cassel as the lead, but when the crime film bar has been set so high by the likes of Scarface, Mesrine falls a little short.

www.watershed.co.uk

Matthew Whittle www.matthewwhittleblog.blogspot.com