It takes a lot to make me sympathize with arms dealers, especially the ruthless and pure evil ones, but Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s relentlessly whimsical and quirky Micmacs very nearly succeeds. The movie opens promisingly enough, with a beautifully shot (by Tetsuo Nagata) prologue high in style and speed. As a child Bazil is effectively orphaned when his soldier father is killed in war and his mother driven mad by grief.
The bad luck continues for the adult Bazil (played by Dany Boon), when a stray bullet plants itself in his forehead in such a way as to be unremoveable. Bazil subsequently loses job and home and falls into a quaint period of homelessness that is a loving homage to Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, and acts, in retrospect, almost as an idyll before the high energy escapades to come.
The idyll comes to an end when Bazil is adopted into a motley “family” of strenuously eccentric misfits, a veritable Coney Island freak show of oddball skills and personalities who live peaceably in one of those hyper-elaborate Mad Max/Matrix/Terry Gilliamesque junkyard baroque / steampunk fantasias. It looks exactly as though it was created over many months of hard labor by an army of movie set dressers, and no doubt was.
Soon enough Bazil learns that the land mine that killed his father and the bullet that shattered his head were produced by rival arms manufacturers whose gothic headquarters—holy cinematic coincidence!—just happen to be located across the street from each other. Thus he and the rest of the Micmac family—having, apparently, absolutely nothing else to do with their days but invent wind-up Rube Goldberg toys from junkyard bits and pieces—embark on a shaggy dog campaign of revenge… and this time, it’s personal.
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