Micmacs

Bazil (centre) and his new family in Micmacs

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is in my opinion - and thousands of other people’s – the daddy of modern French cinema. Past credits have included the uber-cute Amelie, the darkly funny Delicatessen and the plain dark but extraordinary City of Lost Children: this is basically a guy with a vision on a par with Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Guillermo del Toro. His new venture, Micmacs, is another film stuffed full of his quirky inventiveness and homages to past greats of the silver screen.

Our hero, Bazil (Dany Boon), is a man whose father was taken from his as a child by a landmine explosion and who now spends his days watching and reciting films in the video shop he works at, seemingly lost in another reality because of the tragedy that befell his family. That is until he gets shot in the head by a one in a million chance accident with a gun. You may be thinking he’s not the luckiest guy in the world, but you’d be wrong...ish. He manages to survive the shooting but on the downside is left with a bullet permanently embedded in his skull and no job or flat to come back to from the hospital.  That is until he is invited to live with a crew of misfits who have made their home deep within a salvage yard. With payback on his mind, he seeks revenge on the arms manufacturers who produced the bullet that is wedged in his head and the mine that killed his father and all with the help of his new-found family.

Out busking one day he meets a new friend who takes him into his home which is full of society’s outcast. His new peers are made up of a female contortionist who can often be found hiding in boxes, fridges, suitcases and other small compartments, Elastic Girl; an ethnographer who only talks in proverbs, Remington; a human cannonball, Buster; a wide-eyed girl who calculates everything that is going on, Calculette; an ingenious inventor with the strength of Hercules, Petit Pierre; an ex-con (who introduces Bazil to the crew), Slammer and the mother of the brood, Mama Chow, who lost her own children in a hall of mirrors. They are an unlikely bunch, yet conversely, a likely gang. Together they unite with Bazil to aid him in creating and executing an audacious plan to take down the men who have had a large hand in destroying Bazil’s, and many others, life.

 

Buster (Dominique Pinon) in Micmacs

Boon is excellent in the role of Bazil, even though he wasn’t first choice for the part, and his early career days as a mime artist obviously helped him develop the expressive character of Bazil. Micmacs definitely has a lot of nods to the silent films of the early 20^th Century, there are a lot of farce and slapstick moments that are reminiscent of Chaplin films. The humour throughout is often child-like, albeit a dark child at times, and very Gallic. The speech is not the driving force behind the film, rather the over played facial expressions and body movements and the exaggerated characters -think Wallace and Gromit but with humans. The baddies of the piece are evil to the core, one of them an avid collector of macabre celebrity body parts and both unrepentant of their chosen careers. It deserves a cheer when Bazil and his team’s plan is carried out and the villains are made to suffer in a style they are usually the cause of, not the victims of. 

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