The French come out in droves for Mesrine (Death Instinct)

One of the markets where High School Musical 3: Senior Year didn’t come out on top this past weekend was the country of France. 500 000-plus patrons of French cinema got to sink their teeth into the first of two bio-flicks on infamous French gangster Mesrine. I wasn’t able to read the North American reaction to the premiere of the first volume at TIFF since I skipped town before it showed, but the critical consensus among the French critics is that Death Instinct (L’Instinct de Mort) is a better than average film and topliner Vincent Cassel was just awarded a Best Actor award for his perf at the Tokyo Film Fest. This bodes well for Senator Entertainment US – the new distribution company who have yet to set sail on their maiden voyage into a difficult marketplace, but this should be their tentpole project for a well-placed double 2009 release — perhaps in a familiar release pattern as what is expected with the Che films. Public Enemy No.1 will be released in France in the third weekend of November. Below are the French movie posters and TIFF’s synopsis for filmmaker Jean-François Richet‘s pair of films. 

Featuring a cast of French and Québécois all-stars that includes Vincent Cassel, Gérard Depardieu, Roy Dupuis and Cécile de France, Mesrine is a hard-charging epic about one of Europe’s most daring gangsters. This is Scarface, en français. Inspired by Jacques Mesrine’s autobiographical book L’Instinct de mort – which he wrote in prison shortly before his magnificent final escape – Jean-François Richet’s fast-paced drama charts Mesrine’s rise from a wayward French soldier in Algeria to a bolder and bolder criminal on the streets of Paris. Mesrine’s outlaw odyssey even brought him to Canada, where he fell in with separatist radicals in Quebec. Thirty years after French police gunned him down in a spectacular shootout, his infamy lives on. Equal parts thriller and biopic, Mesrine remains faithful to its central character, a dynamic figure who is by no means a model protagonist. The first of two paired films about the man, Mesrine lays the foundation for his later crime sprees in a trial-by-fire sequence in Algeria. Mesrine gets a taste for raw power after an episode interrogating a prisoner, and once back in France he realizes that power and money are all there for the taking. His only obstacle is Guido, the ruthless local crime boss (Depardieu). Cassel and Depardieu sink their teeth deep into these characters; the showdown between Mesrine and Guido is one of the more thrilling set pieces this year. And once Mesrine meets the beautiful and equally reckless Jeanne Schneider (de France), he has a Bonnie to match his Clyde. They launch into a string of armed robberies that takes them from Paris all the way to Montreal. Richet paints Mesrine’s story in bold strokes on a vast canvas. His use of music and the vigour and inventiveness of the film’s visual style will invite comparisons to Martin Scorsese, but Richet brings a particularly French feel to the tale. This is a grand, audacious portrait of the man behind the myth.