Micmacs a Tire-Larigot is the latest offering from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the purveyor of such delights as Amelie (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain), and is likely to be a great favorite with local audiences for its mixture of the cult of cute with a Gallic whimsy. But ever since the huge excitement that greeted the release of the dark comedy Delicatessen in 1991, Jeunet has been plowing the same furrow, and the crop is becoming decidedly anemic.
This is not to say that Micmacs is a bad film, and in tackling the subject of the Western arms industry selling weapons to third world terrorists, Jeunet is breaking new ground, expanding his range from bourgeois fantasy into the realm of contemporary issues and world politics. But the characters of Jeunet’s imagination seem all too familiar, and Micmacs features much the same bunch of social misfits and weirdos that inhabited Delicatessen and to a lesser extent his 1995 film The City of Lost Children. Let us also not forget Jeunet’s disastrous efforts to crowbar such characters into the Aliens franchise with Aliens: Resurrection (2007).
Micmacs leaps out from the starting block with a roller-coaster ride of twists and turns that introduces us to Bazil (Dany Boon), a video rental store attendant who is accidentally shot when he witnesses a drive-by shooting. In the background, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep is playing, and the introductory credits are given in the style of old black-and-white movies. The mood is playful, cinematically savvy, and full of energy, providing a considerable amount of backstory in just a few images and virtually no words.
This has always been Jeunet’s strength, and in Micmacs dialogue is secondary to the moving image. You are being spoken to in pictures, and the acting style complements this with its theatrical boldness that borders on the exaggerated movement of mime. The deftness of the opening 15 minutes is inspiring, but then the weight of more conventional storytelling begins to drag it down. Micmacs has energy enough to keep going, but the initial effervescent airiness is lost.
The story revolves around two rival arms companies, one whose land mines are responsible for the death of Bazil’s father and the latter for the bullet that is lodged inside his skull. Out of work and out of hope after recovering from being shot, Bazil meets up with a bunch of people living in a rubbish tip at the edge of the city. It is the sort of junkyard that furnishes its inhabitants with an endless supply of materials that they can recycle into objects for use and amusement. It does not smell, it does not harbor disease. It is in fact quite the coziest rubbish tip you are likely to find even in the magical realms of cinema.
Living off the detritus of society, these misfits, who include a contortionist and a former human cannonball, come together to help Bazil in his quest to take revenge on the arms dealers. They draw on a wide range of skills and items fashioned from their rubbish tip. This manages to include some state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, all stylishly distressed and very retro-chic.
There are some delightfully amusing ploys, and a scene in which the arms dealers are brought face to face with their greed and inhumanity, which shifts from tub-thumping moralizing to farce in the blink of an eye, is a masterful piece of legerdemain.
Alas, for all its style and verve, the characters of Micmacs never quite come alive. Everything is just a little too carefully put in place, and the darkly anarchic forces that energized the director’s early work have been sanitized and trivialized. One gets the feeling of yet another creative force being set adrift and watered down as it flows into the mainstream.
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