Coming home tonight, late back from the cinema, a trio of youths made comments about my clothes, disrespecting my trousers in particular.  It’s got all the hallmarks of a ‘youth gone bad’ story, except I decided to credit them with humour rather than malice.  As a result, I got talking to one of them in particular, and discovered he’s bound for France on a one year basketball scholarship.

All this, of course, was possible because we shared a spirit of fun.  And besides, they were right — my trousers are too short.  The result would have been very different had I been brutal gangster Jacques Mesrine, whose life of crime I had just seen recounted in Mesrine: Killer Instinct.  At least that’s if the premise of the film is to be believed, and that Mesrine’s violent tendencies were exacerbated by institutional terror.  His first taste was as a soldier in Algiers, and a later dose of solitary incarceration in Canada just strengthened his loathing of authoritarian brutality.

The film zips through a decade of Mesrine’s life expertly, brief scenes capturing key moments in his personal and criminal life.  Presented with a job in a lace business by his father, Jacques instead opts for a wayward life “off the books” that a friend is already living, and which provides him with a cool car that he’d never get to drive as a junior functionary in a lace factory.

The two friends burgle a big house and, lightning fast, Jacques pretends they’re cops investigating the case when the owners come back and find them amid their belongings.  It’s a scene of wit and bravado, and that plus the company of women is mighty attractive compared to the conservatism of living with his parents.  Pretty soon Jacques cuts a rakish figure, spending money easily and finding women even easier: even his Spanish girlfriend having their baby doesn’t slow him down.  Tellingly, it’s crime boss Guido who waits in the hospital with Jacques for the birth, and not his own father.

Why stop at one baby?  Next thing you know he’s the father of three, and having spent a while in prison is doing his best to go straight as a model maker.  But that doesn’t last, and pretty soon he’s doing what he enjoys best, having made it clear to his wife where his loyalties lie by shoving a revolver in her mouth.  It’s just one of many violent scenes in the film, this one particularly telling because of its emotional aspect.  Make no mistake, Jacques is a bastard, albeit a fascinating one.

Directed by Jean-Francois Richet, it’s a fast moving and gorgeously filmed tale with a strong central performance from Vincent Cassel.  He’s got something of the old school matinee idol about him, and an edge of danger too: the combination makes him fascinating to watch, especially given the scale of his adventures.

Unwelcome in France, Jacques and his new lover make their way to Canada and get hired to look after an infirm millionaire.  All goes well at first, but when the lover argues with the gardener who’s served the millionaire for twenty years, he gives them their marching orders.  Which only goes to show that elderly men in wheelchairs shouldn’t assume that wealth means they have power: Jacques and his girlfriend kidnap the old boy, and the resultant case puts them high on the list of Canada’s Public Enemies.

Things necessarily slow down when Jacques goes to prison in Canada, to establish the new environment and the appalling regime which is used to try and break Mesrine.  Ultimately, the attempt backfires: Jacques is determined to escape the prison, and manages not only to do that but to come back and try and bust the other prisoners out too.  It’s a measure of how sick the regime is that such camaraderie develops between Mesrine and the other inmates.

This is just the first part of the Mesrine story, and I’m fascinated to find out what happens in the second, which charts what happens to him in the latter years of his life.  As an adaptation of a man’s life, this is one of the strongest films of its type I have seen, and head and shoulders above the great majority of British crime films.

Want new insight into a creative project or other issue?  Come to the Constellations workshop in Nottingham, August 29.  Click for more details.