Cecile De France

Hereafter

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For the first time, Clint Eastwood ventures into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death.  It’s also a departure for screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United).   The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.

The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans.  Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings.  Young boys enabling a druggie mother.  People in a hostel watching for the last breath of a loved one.  Experienced, skilled and loving foster parents facing a challenge that they cannot fathom.  Every instance of human behavior is completely authentic.

Equally realistic is the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film – an Indonesian tsunami, not overblown in any way, but frightening in its verisimilitude.

Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances.  Bryce Dallas Howard has an Oscar-worthy performance of a woman achingly eager to move past the painful episodes of her life.   The child actor Frankie McLaren carries significant stretches of the story with his unexpressed longing and childish relentlessness.  Cecile de France ably plays a successful television anchor compelled by events to veer her life in a different direction. Richard Kind delivers a moving portrayal of a man seeking closure after the death of his wife.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

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This is the riveting real life tale of Jacques Mesrine – a French criminal with a portfolio of audacious heists and even more shockingly daring escapes.  He became intoxicated by – and addicted to – his own notoriety, which he embellished with some left wing political posing.  He saw himself as a modern Clyde Barrow and positioned himself that way in the media (without thinking too much about the final scene in Bonnie and Clyde).  At the end of the day, Mesrine was just a vicious thug, although one with an unusual amount of bravado and luck.

Vincent Cassell brings Mesrine to life in a brilliant performance that does not glorify Mesrine, but inhabits a countenance that shifts  instantaneously from jokey charm to cold-blooded hatred.  American audiences may remember Cassell as the psycho Russian gangster in Eastern Promises and the suave Francois “The Night Fox” Toulour  in the Ocean’s movies.

Director Jean-Francois Richet showcases Cassell’s performance with a series of outstanding artistic choices.  The harsh violence is shown for what it is but not stylized.  Richet makes strategic use of split screen that enhances the story without distracting from it.  And when Mesrine meets his new girlfriend (Cecile De France) and she says that she’s up for anything, the movie immediately cuts to the two of them robbing a bank.  Point made.

Richet and Abdel Raouf Dafri (screenwriter of A Prophet) adapted the screenplay from Mesrine’s memoir.  Dafri has had a spectacular year in crime and prison dramas.

The entire cast is good, particularly Gerard Depardieu, who summons all his hulking menace to play a gang leader who is at least as dangerous as Mesrine.

Richet and Cassell return later this year with the second part of the story, titled Mesrine: Public Enemy #1.