Movie Review: Micmacs

LITTLE ROCK — Jean-Pierre Jeunet could be described as sort of a Gallic Terry Gilliam, as he often seems concerned with overly intricate mechanisms and the amplified, unintended consequences of seemingly trivial occurrences.

While he’s best known in this country for the sweet strange love fable Amelie (2001), which was as much a valentine to the Paris-locked village of Montmarte as to Audrey Tautou’s uncomplicated loveliness, there’s generally a seed of bitterness at the heart of Jeunet’s dark chocolate confections.His early films (made in collaboration with the animator Marc Caro) Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1996) are fantastic dystopian visions populated with well-intended freaks, capitalistic scoundrels and imperiled innocents. They read more like disturbing dreams than black comedies.

Jenuet’s latest, Micmacs is, superficially at least, another antiquely gold-shot, tres francais experience set in a Paris of sidewalk cafes and impish gamines, populated with Jeunet’s usual array of unusual suspects and even a naive hero with an incorruptible sense of justice, just like Amelie (or, for that matter, Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo industrial complex). It’s about a simple, sweet-souled man named Bazil (Dany Boon) whose soldat father was blown apart while attempting to defuse a land mine in North Africa in 1979.

Bazil stuffs his father’s death into his hurt locker for 30 years, and winds up managing a video store in a bland Paris suburb. One night at the store, while he’s watching Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, there’s a ruckus in the street outside and Bazil catches a stray bullet between the eyes. He survives, but notwithout side effects, chief among them the loss of his job and his apartment.

Having dropped through the bottom of the French social safety net, Bazil finds himself taken in by a marginalized company of scavengers presided over by den mother “Madame Chow” Tambouille (played by the marvelous Yolande Moreau of Seraphine). Among these “micmacs” are a venerable criminal (Jean-Pierre Marielle) who narrowly escaped the guillotine in the ’50s, a human cannonball (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon), a contortionist (Julie Ferrier) and a tiny strongman (Michel Cremades) who constructs Rube Goldberg-style mechanical devices.

Bazil, upon learning that the companies who manufactured the devices responsible for his life’s twin traumas - the mine that killed his father and the bullet that parked near his brain - are located across the street from each other, enlists his new friends in a typically intricate andgimmick-employing quest for liberal moral justice.

But while Jeunet tells a story here (and it’s an alternately amusing and dispiriting tale with a kind of moral at the end), the munitions dealers’ comeuppance seems ultimately beside the point. Jeunet’s tale might be best appreciated by bright children (although the film’s R-rating argues against it, I think it belongs to the same class of smart kids’ movies as Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me). As a filmmaker, his prime virtues have to do with textural details, discursive forays into character, little grace notes that accrete into rueful human - and humane - comedy.

Films like Micmacs are one of the reasons I don’t put much stock in the grades that I and other critics routinely assign movies - the chances are, you and I will not really remember this movie for very long, and that when we think of it, if we think of it, it will be as a minor part of Jeunet’s oeuvre, something typical of his work. It is utterly missable, utterly dismissable - it will change the world less than most churned-out motion picture products. Yet from another angle, depending on how the light strikes it, it can take on exquisite, low-key mournfulness, the melancholy soul of an overlooked classic.