Micmacs (2010)

Stars: Dany Boon and Dominique Pinon

Director: Jean Pierre Jeunet

Plugs: None

Even if you watch the new film Micmacs without sound and just read the subtitles (and therefore don’t hear the French dialogue), you would probably recognize it as a French film. It is thoroughly francophonic from first to last frame.

The film quite literally begins with a bang, as a French soldier in Afghanistan is blown up by a land mine. His personal effects are soon shipped to his grieving family, and his son Bazil looks through them and notices a manufacturer’s mark on the remains of the mine that killed his father. Fast-forward twenty or so years to find Bazil employed at a home video store, watching an old Bogart movie (the French have a fondness for films-within-films). As he mouths every word of the dialogue, he is interrupted by a car wreck that occurs just outside his store. As it turns out, it is actually an assassination, and Bazil gets shot in the head as goes to look at what happened.

The bullet lodges near his brain and cannot be removed without killing him. He finds another of the assassin’s bullets and recognizes a mark on the casing; it is the same company that manufactured the mine that killed his father. He becomes obsessed with finding out more about the company and people whose products damaged his life. However he is homeless, unable to hold down a job (presumably in part due to mild brain damage), and earns money as a street performer. He is soon adopted by a ragtag group of social castouts who live in a junkyard and have made a cottage industry of salvaging and repairing discarded equipment.

Bazil comes across the mysterious weapons manufacturer yet again, and decides to take revenge on the merchants of death with the help of his new friends with special skills (one is a mechanical genius, another a contortionist, a brilliant mathematician, and so on). The presidents of two top arms manufacturers get their comeuppance in what is essentially a whimsical satire of the arms trade.

There are more than a few plot holes and narrative flaws, and the film cannot—and should not—be taken seriously. It’s one of those caper movies in which the only way that everything could possibly go according to plan is if the heroes could correctly predict everyone else’s actions. Normally such implausibilities annoy me, but I was too charmed by Micmacs to grumble about contrivances.

Micmacs is beautifully shot, and a pleasure to look at on its own terms. Jean Pierre Jeunet’s name may or may not be familiar to many American audiences, but he has left an indelible mark with films such as Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, and Amelie. If you have no patience for subtitles and the French sense of absurdity, Micmacs may not be for you; others should give it a shot.