As I missed A Very Long Engagement, this is the first film Jeunet has released since Amélie that I have caught. That charming, quirky smash hit temporarily established Jeunet as an arthouse darling, brought a new audience (including myself) to his earlier films Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (although the Playstation tie-in had at least initiated me to the latter), and steered him away from the disastrous career that could have resulted from Alien Resurrection. However, with the opportunity to be a strange neo-auteur in the Burton or Gilliam mode, Jeunet has slipped from prominence with only two films in the near-decade since Amélie and now returned with a very uneven film that may make money based on his reputation but certainly won’t be a big commercial success. His next one had better be revelatory.
Micmacs could have been superb with a little more of Jeunet’s trademark whimsy and more charming characters, or possibly actors. The ingredients were in place, the story more or less an adult version of twee children’s books in which dastardly, powerful adults are beaten by the ingenuity of a group of misfits and outcasts, but the middle portion of the film just sagged, and it didn’t engage until the very end.
The story more or less went like this: Bazil is one of life’s very unlucky people, from a very unlucky family – a fact brilliantly established in a five-second scene where a powercut ends, the family blow out the candles they have set up, and then immediately the power fails once again. His father is killed clearing landmines, and then thirty years later, he hears a gunshot, looks out of the door of the shop he works in and is hit by a strange bullet. He does not die, but must live with a bullet lodged in his brain that could kill him at any moment, and finds upon his release from hospital that assuming he will not survive, his boss has replaced him and his landlady has re-let his room and given away his possessions. Becoming a drifter, he meets what I assume are the Micmacs, a rag-tag group of outcasts, including a contortionist, a human cannonball, an inventor who makes wonderful robots out of junk that provide some of the film’s best moments, and a human calculator. Scraping by with them, he finds the two arms companies who made the landmine that killed his father and the bullet that nearly did the same to him, and finding their corporate leaders to be contemptible, smug, exploitative men, resolves to bring the companies down with the help of his new friends.
It could have been so much fun, with a great cast of oddballs. But the trouble is that Jeunet seems to stick them all together, tack on some romantic tension and expect them to be enchanting on their own. In fact, the reason the film doesn’t quite succeed is that his Micmacs just aren’t very likeable. Bazil isn’t sympathetic enough to carry the film, the others mostly just fulfil their roles and never have any depth beyond their character quirks, and the contortionist was just plain annoying, with the weird arch way she delivered her lines. It’s even hard to be sympathetic with Dominic Pinon’s thin character, the best of the bunch is the funny little man who doesn’t talk, and most of the schemes they put into practice are needlessly convoluted, yet not to the extent that they entertain like an ‘usine à gaz’. It’s actually much more compelling to watch the arms dealers when they start to wage war on one another. The final setpiece, an old trick used in several children’s stories, is a satisfying end to the film with a more serious political message, but I did not get the emotional payoff I may have done if I was really on the side of the good characters, and not wishing that they had been mostly in the shadows to give the arms dealers more screen time.
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