Review of Micmacs (2009) by Edith N — 07 Aug 2011

With the Whimsy and the Goings-On.

Once again, I am left rather wishing that I were able to put this movie into the category of "weird damn French crap." Don't get me wrong. As is obvious, I enjoyed it, but that doesn't mean I always understood what was going on or why. After all, it's a pretty odd film from a director who's known for them, a director who freely acknowledges that his movies are not always the most logical ones going--and that this one has a lot to do with the other weird ones he's made in the past, at least thematically. So he knows. I like that he's okay with it, too, because there's something good about people who know they're weird and don't try to fight it. I think, having seen [i]Alien: Resurrection[/i]--or anyway most of it--that he makes better movies when he can acknowledge that he's not a typical Hollywood director. Contrary to what the studios seem to think, there's nothing wrong with that.

Late one night, Bazil (Dany Boon) is watching [i]The Big Sleep[/i] at work in a video shop when a car chase goes past. In a freak accident, a gun is dropped, the gun goes off, and a bullet hits Bazil in the head. Unfortunately, when he gets out of the hospital, he's been evicted, all of his belongings have been stolen, and he's been fired. He does what he can to keep himself fed, mostly busking, and then he is befriended by Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle). Slammer is one of a group of freaks who live together in the underworld of Paris. One day, Bazil discovers that the bullet which is lodged in his head still and the landmine which killed his father (more on which anon) were made by companies whose headquarters are across the street from one another. Bazil decides to take his revenge with the help of his new friends, and events escalate in increasingly improbable ways which, I must confess, get a little creepy. Also, there is the burgeoning relationship between Bazil and Elastic Girl (Julie Ferrier).

So land mines. The thing is, Bazil's father was doing a job which people still do in France, and indeed quite a few companies, to this day. He was going through fields with a metal detector and attempting to disarm mines from who knows how many years ago. There are still World War I mines in the fields of Europe--and they're still killing people. I watched a movie about it not long ago, though I don't think I had enough about it to say to actually write a review. I mean, what do you say? "Wow, it sucks that the residue of wars long gone is still killing people whose parents weren't born yet when the weapons were made"? But it's true. The last veteran of World War I died not that long ago--and he'd enlisted after lying about his age, too. And yet in fields from France to Russia, the mines and artillery shells of that war are still buried, still active, still lethal. I read as a child about a man who'd found an ammunition dump while planting an avocado tree to celebrate his daughter's birthday. That'll stick with you.

The problem with this movie is that the message gets a bit pounded home in the end. The plan involves something extremely complicated to do with an African dictator who is supposedly seeking to return to power. It's certainly true that arms dealers in the Western world are not always fussy about who they're selling weapons to, and it's certainly true that weapons being used to kill Americans are not unlikely to have "made in the USA" printed on them. It's true that many of those weapons are used in genocides around the world were sold to them by unscrupulous businessmen who could not have been totally surprised at the eventual outcome. (Though it's also worth noting that there have been quite a few low-tech genocides where the weapon of choice was, say, the machete.) Tony Stark may have been surprised by this, but no one paying attention to the world is, and we didn't need Jean-Pierre Jeunet to tell us so.

The title of the movie apparently translates to something approximating "nonstop shenanigans." Which is a fun title, even if it isn't strictly an accurate one. There are plenty of shenanigans, and there are wacky characters, and so forth. Hijinks. But there is that serious message, and there are bits where, frankly, I don't quite know what was supposed to be going on at all. This is, you will not be surprised to learn, by the man who brought us [i]Amélie [/i] and [i]Delicatessen[/i], in general the best of the Weird Damn French Crap we've had over the years. And I'm certainly going to have to recommend this to my favourite librarian, who is the only other person I've ever met who has seen the interminable [i]Jeanne Dielman[/i] movie. This is certainly far better than that, even leaving aside the two minutes of preachiness. It's also true that Jeunet is right--those two minutes would indeed end up as a huge YouTube sensation. In fact, they would probably be the lead story on [i]The Daily Show[/i]. Which is good, because that's how more Americans get their awareness of the world than probably should.