Mesrine: Killer Instinct · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film starts with him already dead. Porte de Clignancourt, 1979: a truck eases alongside a parked car, a tarp drops, and the guns open up until the windshield is lace and Jacques Mesrine is meat. You have not met him yet. You will spend the next two hours watching a man you have already seen killed. Then Richet rewinds twenty years and dares you to forget.

That ambush is the engine of everything after it. The structure isn't a flourish — it changes what kind of attention you bring. You stop asking will he get away and start asking how does a working-class kid back from Algeria become the body in that car. The whole biography becomes a slope, and you already know where it bottoms out.

For long stretches Killer Instinct is pure action-image — Deleuze's name for cinema where a character sizes up a situation and acts to change it, the body answering the world blow for blow, situation and act locked in a tight circuit. Mesrine robs, beats, runs, breaks out of prison. Cassel plays him with what the dossier rightly calls coiled readiness; the sensory-motor circuit runs at full power and never stalls. This is the large form specifically: a milieu — sixties Paris, neon and easy money, Guido's old-guard underworld — presses on a man until a decisive act transforms his place in it. Genre runs on this. The polar from Melville's Le Samouraï gave Richet the baseline: the criminal whose private code grants him coherence against a rotten institutional order. Mesrine inherits the grammar and then wrecks it.

Here's the wrinkle that makes the film stranger than its kinetics suggest. The action never hesitates, but the story around the action cannot be trusted — because its source is Mesrine's own prison memoir, L'instinct de mort, a work of self-glorification. The film is adapting a forgery. Deleuze has an exact figure for this: le faussaire, the forger — not a man who lies (a liar still honors truth by inverting it) but one who makes truth, shifting from identity to identity so that no stable fact survives to be checked against. Watch how Mesrine lives in disguises, provocations, performances. Cassel, the dossier notes, plays him performing for an audience even when alone. That is the forger as a way of being. And it pulls the film toward what Deleuze called the powers of the false — where true and false stop being decidable and become a creative principle. The remarkable thing is the register. Deleuze located these powers in difficult art cinema, in Welles and Robbe-Grillet, films that slow down and dare you to lose the thread. Richet smuggles the undecidable into a Pathé crowd-pleaser. The thrill you feel during a robbery is the legend doing its work on you — and the film knows it, and lets you feel both at once.

This is fabulation: the subject caught in the act of legending himself. Mesrine isn't discovering who he is; he's authoring it, live, with the camera as accomplice. The debt here is to GoodFellas — Scorsese's freeze-frame prologue and retrospective voiceover that glamorizes and ironizes in the same gesture — and to Bonnie and Clyde, where Penn flashes forward to the ambush so the ending shadows every scene. Richet takes both and grounds them in a real corpse on a real Paris street.

Underneath the legend runs something older and dumber than ambition. The title is L'instinct de mort — the death instinct — and the film opens in Algeria, shot dirtier and more disorienting than anything in Paris, the handheld proximity to coerced bodies lifted straight from Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. Deleuze would read this as the impulse-image: a world of raw drives erupting beneath the social surface, sloping irreversibly toward exhaustion and death. Colonial Paris is the derived milieu, the polished everyday; Algeria is the originary world it sits on top of, the savage layer where the drives were forged. The film draws the causal line — military brutality manufacturing a career criminal — without making it schematic. And the slope is the same slope the prologue already showed you. Death is in frame one. Everything after is just the descent finding its route.

Notice, finally, the body. Cassel's performance is the film's argument, and it's a performance of performance: theatrical self-presentation, the love of disguise, violence as expression rather than tool. Deleuze called this the gest — a posture that exposes a social or theatrical relation instead of advancing a plot. Cassel's decade-spanning physical transformation borrows De Niro's actor-as-project model from Raging Bull; the gunfire, dry and percussive, borrows Heat's refusal to romanticize ballistics. Both pull against mythology while the legend pulls toward it.

That tension is the film's real achievement. It reasserted the ambition of French popular cinema, yes. But it also did something quietly radical: it built a biopic that knows the biography is propaganda written by its subject, and let you enjoy the propaganda anyway. Rewatch it and watch yourself being recruited. The charm is the forgery. Watch Cassel perform for no one, and you'll see the trick — a man making himself true by refusing to hold still long enough to be false.