French humour is, to say the least, an acquired taste.
With that in mind, Micmacs — Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s tale of merry street folk who take on the arms industry — is a farce for people who go to Cirque du Soleil for the jokes.
I mean this literally. Micmacs is a movie with a gang of heroes that includes a contortionist, a human cannonball and various other oddball characters whose chief facial characteristic is mime-like exaggeration.
Here’s another way to tell how you might or might not enjoy this Rube Goldberg framework of slapstick set pieces: Jeunet’s main claim to fame is Amelie, and this movie strains to be every bit as adorable — with an added frisson of social comment.
As Micmacs opens, we are introduced to Bazil, a sad-sack figure in the Pierrot-esque clown tradition. As a child, the deadly product of one arms manufacturer robbed him of his Legionaire father (in a terrorist bombing). A loner video store employee who passes his days mouthing the dialogue of classic films, Bazil is once more visited by the shadow of death when a drive-by shooting results in him being collateral damage with a bullet in his brain (the product of a competing arms manufacturer).
The bullet, amazingly, does not kill him — though it does subject him to cinematic hallucinations. Released from hospital, he finds himself both jobless and homeless (his boss and landlord having given him up for dead).
Thus it is that he makes the acquaintance of Mama Chow (Yolande Moreau), the leader of a group of misfits living in the bowels of the city, making machinery and devices from the castoff parts of a throwaway society. It’s like the pickpocket gang from Oliver if they were adults, French and five times as adorable.
They include: Calculator (Marie-Julie Baup), who compulsively spits out numbers and calculations like Spock, Buster the Human Cannonball (Dominique Pinon), mechanical genius Tiny Pete (Michel Cremades), African ethnographer Remington (Omar Sy) and Elastic Girl (Julie Ferrier).
With complete disregard to the normal pace of human interaction, Mama Chow’s gang hears Bazil’s tale of woe and cheerfully demands en masse to be part of his plan to extract revenge on arms dealers Nicolas Thibault de Fenouillet (Andre Dussollier) and Francois Marconi (Nicolas Marie).
They do this by fomenting war between the competing death merchants. They slip Elastic Girl down chimneys to conduct surveillance. They engage in sting operations to mess up blackmarket negotiations with rogue African warlords. They create explosions and plant hints that the pyro was the work of the competitor.
Nicolas and Francois — both of whom are intimately “connected” to the French government — start to lose it, putting their public veneer of respectability at stake with their vein-throbbing anger and misplaced wrath.
All of this goes down with a relentlessly cheerful joie de vivre, and a mindset that grimaces, saucer-eyes and spit-takes are the essence of humour. Bazil is a likeable enough character though. And Jeunet’s secondary intent to tip his hat to the Golden Age of cinema is endearing (he uses the score of the Bogart film The Big Sleep, for example).
The trouble is, as committed as Jeunet is to the labyrinthine comic machinery that passes for a plot, I don’t remember laughing.
(This film is rated 14A)
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