Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2008, Dir. Jean-François Richet)

Just to be confusing, Killer Instinct is only the first half of a two-part biopic of the French gangster Jacques Mesrine, and is given the on-screen subtitle: Public Enemy Number One – Part One. It was swiftly followed by its sequel, distributed in the UK with the title Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, but with the on-screen subtitle: Public Enemy Number One – Part Two. I am aware of people who have gone to see the second film, completely unaware that they were missing out on nearly two hours’ worth of preceding story. And they really are missing out.

Just to be even more confusing, Michael Mann’s gangster biopic Public Enemies was released shortly beforehand. Mann’s effort, following the life of John Dillinger, was disappointingly dull, moribund even, enlivened only by a couple of cracking action sequences. Cast in the titular role, Johnny Depp was subdued, his performance, unmemorable. Killer Instinct is almost effortlessly superior. For starters, Vincent Cassel is an effusive Jacques Mesrine, always dangerous, always beguiling. Other characters – Gerard Depardieu’s Guido and Cécile De France’s Jeanne Schneider, for example – already subordinate in the script, are almost entirely eclipsed by Cassel’s swagger.

The expeditious narrative momentum is handled confidently by Richet, but I can’t help feel that he does occasionally lose control: Mesrine flirts with a girl he meets in a bar, and then (how much time has passed?) holds up a casino at gunpoint with her; Mesrine’s parents are, one moment, shunned by their son, the next, looking after his children and bidding him a tender farewell as he flees the country. In a sense, the omissions hardly matter – this is not a film that wastes time with exposition – and the breakneck speed is invigorating.

Mesrine’s exile in Canada sees him befriend a member of the Quebec Liberation Front, kidnap his millionaire employer, carry out a double bank heist; all leading to him getting tortured in a grim high-security prison, breaking out, only to then return to the jail in an attempt to free the other prisoners which is so audacious that it would be entertaining even if the resulting fire-fight weren’t brilliantly executed. (It leaves you nearly as breathless as reading aloud that last sentence.) The prolepsis with which the film begins, looking ahead to its sequel, tells us that Jacques Mesrine will return in Public Enemy No. 1 – or, to put it in his own words, “No one kills me until I say so” – but this doesn’t detract at all from the excitement of Killer Instinct.

Home (2008, Dir. Ursula Meier)

Last year saw the release of Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, an elegiac film which dealt with three grown-up children picking over their deceased mother’s estate, a beautiful country house containing an extensive art collection which once belonged to her uncle. A sense of sadness pervaded the film as it dwelt on a modern society that all too often places financial value over sentimental value; and in which family ties are disrupted as siblings move abroad to work in countries as far-flung as China and America. Nevertheless, one left the cinema with a real sense not just of the fragility of the family unit, but also of its importance: the time spent together results in shared memories with which we can imbue a house in which we have lived with a lasting emotional worth we can carry away with us.

On the face of it, Home is in complete contrast to Summer Hours – it deals with a family who make a stand against modernisation and refuse to leave their house, leading to a Pyrrhic struggle – but it falls short of providing an equivalent contemplative message.

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Ricky Ponting look-alike Michel (Olivier Gourmet) live with their three children in serene rural isolation next to an abandoned road. Their existence is an eccentric, but happy, one; and Meier shows a deft touch when developing an opening half-hour of real warmth and humour. However, the road is then re-opened (and given its own radio station), which will spoil everything – not just for the family, but also for the audience. For no matter the perpetual stream of traffic rumbling past her front door, chugging out exhaust fumes; no matter that to get to work or to school involves a perilous slalom between speeding cars; no matter that her youngest son is wetting the bed, or that one of her daughters has run away and the other has taken to eating grass – Marthe will not leave.

Why won’t she leave? Perhaps it is because this film is a heavy-handed metaphor that can only follow the narrow ‘one-way’ path defined by its own restrictive premise. Perhaps we are meant to infer that Marthe has previously suffered some form of mental breakdown, and that this has left her incapable of dealing with change in a fast-paced world. Or perhaps Marthe is simply incredibly annoying. (Certainly, one imagines that Marthe, portrayed by an actress less skilled than the formidable Huppert, would be a completely unsympathetic character.)

As the family begin the process of bricking themselves up inside their house, one thing is for sure: their obduracy is not inspiring, but irritating. At the end of Summer Hours, the three siblings disperse; at the end of Home, the family seal themselves off from the outside world. The former is poignant but uplifting; the latter only serves to remind us that stupidity can be destructive.