Stylish and inventive, Jean-Pierre Jeunet has intrigued us with dark fantasies Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, delighted us with Amelie, A Very Long Engagement, and frightened us with the underrated Alien: Resurrection. Micmacs is overloaded with Jeunet tropes and an excess of that rare thing – Gallic whimsy.
Micmacs à Tire-Larigot (“Suspect Activities” or “Jiggery-Pokery” at “Tire-Larigot” – the underground lair filled with extraordinary inventions and sculptures.) wears its’ heart on its’ sleeve. As a darkly comic satire on the arms industry framed in a Robin Hood, Ali Baba, TV’s Mission Impossible ‘caper movie’ it is drenched in Jeunet’s warped humour, a cast of bizarre caricatures, sight gags and nonsensical plotting.
Unfortunate orphan Bazil (Dany Boon) has his bomb disposal officer father blown up by a French landmine, and years later is himself shot with a French bullet. Unemployed and on the street, busking as a Chaplain mime, Bazil falls in with the underground eco-recycling gang of Mama Chow, whose daughters disappeared in a fairground hall of mirrors. Her team of human Wombles includes Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle) an elderly master criminal, contortionist Elastic Girl, Remington; a black ethnographer and impersonator; and Buster (Dominique Pinon), comic grotesque and Jeunet regular, a failed human cannonball.
On discovering the rival arms dealers’ factories, and the homes of their ego-maniacal executives, Bazil determines to exact his personal revenge on them both. Continue Reading