Features > Movie Reviews > MICMACS…

Dany Boon (from Welcome to the Sticks) is Bazil, a video store clerk who takes a bullet to the head in a freak drive-by shooting mishap. He survives, but the doctors decide to leave the bullet in there, meaning that he could die at any moment. Released from hospital, he’s jobless and penniless, but his luck changes when he falls in with Slammer (Jean Pierre Mareille) who introduces him to an industrious group of salvage artists making their home in scrap heap beneath a Parisian underpath. It’s a bohemian shelter where tables walk and you never know what contraption you might bump into next. The slightly damaged Bazil is another piece of junk to be reclaimed and put to renewed purpose.

Encouraged by his new friends, Bazil decides to avenge himself on the rival weapons manufacturers responsible for the landmine that killed his father when he was a child and the bullet that felled him.

If that sounds far-fetched, well sure, so was that treasure hunt Amelie set to snare her man. With Jeunet, the question is not the why or the what, but the how.

Each of the scrap heap misfits has his or her special part to play in the operation. One is a contortionist (Julie Ferrier), capable of wrapping herself into a fridge. Another is a human calculator. There’s an ex-con, an inventor and a mother hen who fusses over them all (Yolande Moreau from Seraphine). There’s even the world’s fastest living cannonball (Jeunet favourite Dominique Pinon).

According to Jeunet Toy Story was the inspiration, though it might equally have been the crackpot household in Frank Capra?s screwball You Can’t Take It With You. Either way, they’re not characterized beyond their foibles, but they’re a fun group to hang out with.

Just as well as the plot takes a back seat to whatever comical conceit pops into Jeunet?s whimsically distracted mind. These include musical quotes from old film noir scores courtesy of the great Max Steiner, a delightfully random little echo from Delicatessen, and billboards for the movie we’re watching.

Some may find Jeunet ladles on the quirks a bit too generously, but the escalating sting that pits the two armaments bosses against each other is elaborated with giddy ingenuity; Jeunet is nothing if not a merry mischief-maker.

Although Dany Boon took over the lead role at the last minute after Jamel Debbouze quit the film, his expressive, Chaplin-esque clowning is another big plus.

Slightly over-stuffed, and arguably too cloying to do justice to the subject of landmines and arms dealing, MICMACS is still more than likely to send you off with a big goofy grin on your mug. The original French title, by the way, is ‘Micmacs a tire-larigot’, which I understand translates as ‘Dodgy Dealings by the Dozen’. Now you know.