Mesrine: Killer Instinct · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Mesrine: Killer Instinct opens with its ending — the 1979 ambush at Porte de Clignancourt, Mesrine's body riddled in slow motion — and this structural inversion immediately announces the powers of the false. Richet is working from Mesrine's own memoir, a self-mythologizing text, and he never pretends otherwise: the voiceover threading through the criminal's rise is directly lifted from GoodFellas — the in-medias-res prologue, the return-to-origins structure, the narrator who constructs his own legend even as the camera simultaneously glamorizes and ironizes what it shows. Mesrine is the ultimate forger, a man who authored himself into celebrity criminality, and the film's narration proliferates myth rather than settling into verifiable fact. This mythologizing energy is checked, however, by vérité / direct cinema in the Algerian War sequences, which are the film's moral engine: Richet deploys the docufiction grammar Pontecorvo established in The Battle of Algiers — grainy handheld proximity to bodies under state coercion — to insist on the causal chain between French military brutality and Mesrine's criminal formation. Wide-angle lenses pressed close to performers give the violence unsettling immediacy, resisting the sepia nostalgia of the heritage film tradition. What the war sequences produce is the precondition for the film's action-image pleasures: the episodic picaresque of robberies, prison breaks, and escalating criminal audacity that defines the French polar's sensory-motor logic, here inherited from Melville's Le Samouraï. Mesrine's career becomes pure kinetic cinema — but one whose engine was ignited by the state that first trained him to kill.