Review: Jeunet's 'Micmacs' (HWT)

By Lisa Nesselson

The least melancholy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's French films to date (some people think of "Amelie" as sugar-coated whimsey but there's a deep layer of loss and loneliness running through it), "Micmacs" is a tale of ragtag oddballs fighting the system with homegrown ingenuity and industrial debris. It's full of visual flair, inventive sight gags and the burnished nostalgia Jeunet does so well. What's different this time, is that an old leather suitcase or other vintage artifact may help save the day but up-to-the-minute technology gets in on the act, too. Jeunet has bridged old France and new, right down to the architecture.

(It was widely assumed that the cafe prominently featured in "Amelie" was set-decorated to within an inch of its life but, in fact, the production made very few adjustments to the real establishment. In "Micmacs," Jeunet positively revels in wonderful old buildings and industrial structures only slightly embellished for cinematic impact.)

In a swiftly paced opening - whose accretion of pertinent detail makes some of the body of the picture seem a little pokey in comparison - we see a land mine blow up in the African desert in April of 1979. The casualty is the father of a young boy back in France. The lad escapes from a nun-run school where conditions are no more severe than the Batan Death March and we are re-introduced to him "30 years later" as he watches "The Big Sleep" in the small video store where he works. Let's just say he's VERY familiar with the film.

A gun is discharged in a Rube Goldberg-esque altercation outside the store, causing a stray but determined bullet (a French cousin of the projectile that starred in Arlen Spector's "The Magic Bullet Theory" no doubt) to enter the shop and bounce off a packaged DVD of (ahem) the film we're watching, before lodging in Bazil's forehead.

The credits sequence that follows (and key portions of the rest of the film), uses soaring music by Max Steiner in as smart a manner as Tarantino's use of passages composed by Ennio Morricone in "Inglourious Basterds."

In a funny sequence where a brain surgeon rewrites the expression "it's not exactly brain surgery" - slicing into Bazil's skull the way you might start to divvy up a pizza only to decide you're not hungry after all - it is decided to leave the bullet where it is. Bazil might die at any moment, but that's not as disconcerting as the fact that he's now homeless and jobless.

After fending relatively well for himself on the street (there's a gag involving a female singer in a Paris Metro station that's worth the price of admission) Bazil is taken in by a group of scruffy characters who recycle garbage with inspired aplomb. When Bazil realizes that the firm that made the land mine that creamed his dad is a grenade's throw away from the firm that made the bullet lodged in his noggin, he and his adopted family devise a David vs Goliath revenge scheme of artful yet epic proportions.

The wobbly bullet triggers fake-flashbacks and flights of fancy every bit as entertaining as the voice-over musings of Matt Damon's whistle-blowing character in "The Informant!"

Dany Boon is a beloved standup comic who, by lampooning the received wisdom about the region of France from which he hails, stumbled into writing, directing and co-starring in the biggest French hit of all time "Welcome to the Sticks." To give you an idea: The fellow who composed the 10 minutes or so of music on the film's soundtrack collected some 20 million euros in royalties. At today's exchange rate, that's $29 million. (And rumor has it that he agreed to compose purely out of friendship for Boon - lending new meaning to the expression "a rewarding friendship.")

Boon is a wonderful choice for central protagonist Bazil, in an ensemble cast of French (and Belgian) character actors and comics. But his role was intended for another wildly successful French comic-turned-actor, Jamel Debbouze. Debbouze (who played the nasty grocer's delivery boy in "Amelie,") is fearlessly and compulsively funny in the manner of a toned down Robin Williams. He also lost the use of one arm in a youthful accident. Jeunet and Guillaume Laurent's original script incorporated Debbouze's handicap into the film, spotlighting the damage that weapons, particularly land mines, do. The physical comedy Boon employs is, one assumes, slightly different than Jamel might have managed.

But much as Emily Watson - and not Audrey Tautou - was supposed to play the title lass in "Amelie," it all worked out for the best.

The reviews filed from the film's Toronto premiere are quite enthusiastic. This is subjective and anecdotal, but there was only scattered laughter at the Paris press screening for several hundred people on the morning of September 17th. On the Champs-Elysees sidewalk afterward, I overheard more than one French colleague utter a variation on "We've seen this before."

Really? Unless they were in the editing room while the film was being assembled, I sort of doubt they've seen this particular array of imaginative situations pursued and resolved in these particular ways. You have to go to a double feature of "Fellini's Roma" and "Freaks" to find a comparably distinctive gallery of faces. (People used to undergo surgery to bring prominent ears closer to their heads. In the era of Obama and Boon, perhaps people will start asking plastic surgeons to EXTEND their ears.)

Jeunet has an immediately recognizable visual approach, although he has worked with different cinematographers. And while he describes "Alien 4" as a positive experience, he's happy working in his own language in Europe.

Jeunet has been upfront in recent interviews (he was head of the jury for the 35th Deauville Festival of American Cinema, in Normandy, from Sept. 4-13, and Boon was one of his jurors) and in the French press kit about how little he was tempted to direct an installment of Harry Potter. (He jokes about having lost his DP to the Potter franchise.) Jeunet didn't see the point of stepping into a project where the look of each setting and character is already established. 'Alien 4' was different - they wanted me to provide a visual universe and a tone," Jeunet says, acknowledging he'd be "set for life" if he agreed to do a Hollywood-style picture.

In the case of "Micmacs," we can be grateful he stuck closer to home.