Mic-Macs - A Review

Mic-Macs – A Review

Stylistically, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of Amélie, has been one of the most important influences of the last decade on young filmmakers. Not only that, but his films are so lovingly crafted, there’s an almost artisan touch to them. His films are at once typically French, and yet also universal – they travel well, and are received positively in all parts of the world.

And like a true artisan, Jeunet takes his time with his projects. He genuinely crafts them. It’s been five years since A Very Long Engagement. So his new film, Micmacs (or Micmacs à tire-larigot as it in French) is nothing short of a mini event.

‘It’s good to be a little odd…to get a little even’ reads the tag-line on the English posters for the film, whose plot follows Dany Boon’s character Bazil as he falls in with a motley band of eccentric, colourful characters to take on two big arms.weapons dealer whose devices of death were responsible for (a) Bazil’s father being blown up by a landmine when Bazil was a boy and (b) for the bullet lodged near Bazil’s brain.

After the opening credits, which parody the classic Hollywood movies of the 1930s and early 1940s, accompanied by Max Steiner music, we’re back in the sepia-toned Paris of Amélie that is so beloved of Jeunet – that Paris somewhere between reality and fantasy, the real world and the imaginary, the Paris that doesn’t truly exist, but we wish it did. Certainly, the film freely crosses any such boundaries with a sort of impunity – this is Jeunet’s Paris, after all.

But perhaps that’s what undid the film for me. We’ve seen this Paris before. We’ve seen these characters before. If the setting is reminiscent of Amélie, then the characters are reminiscent of Jeunet’s earlier works Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. In Mic-Macs, Jeunet’s make-shift heroes live in a quasi bohemian lair under a junkyard, where they recycle things, and one character even turns the junk they collect into elaborate mechanical puppets that perform hypnotising dances. The problem I felt was that these characters, their alternative, almost post-apocalyptic subterranean life, seemed recycled from earlier Jeunet films. And not even the performances of the actors (including Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon and Jeunet favourite Yolande Moreau) could disguise this.

The critics in England loved the movie. One critic even went so far as to say “each frame is perfect”. I beg to differ – but not because this is a bad film – it certainly is not. It’s a very good film, and it’s extremely well crafted. But it’s not original. And that’s its problem. And that’s why it didn’t work for me.

As I mentioned above, Jeunet’s style has become almost ubiquitous – particularly for young filmmakers making short films. Jeunet has developed a form of visual hypertext (originally inspired by Sergio Leone) – but one that has been copied almost ad nauseam by his imitators. The problem I had with this film was that it now seems that ‘Jeunet is imitating Jeunet’. The visual style that was so fresh and that worked so well in Amélie, and that was used with greater restraint (appropriately so) in A Very Long Engagement, now seems depassé – out-dated, outmoded. Some of the visual gags we’ve seen before – some are even borrowed from elsewhere (I spotted one that was borrowed from the Simpsons). For me, the moments that worked best were the small moments of silent comedy – few and far between in this film – where Dany Boon seems to channel both Keaton and Chaplin in his facial expressions and mannerisms, like the scene early on where he wants the girl he likes to think that he’s gotten into a cab and driven away, so he pretends to get into a cab and be driven away. I’d like to see Jeunet do a feature-length silent film, but without the gimmicks and the visual hypertext that he usually employs. That would present him with a real challenge.

Because that’s what I felt was lacking in this film: it was Jeunet painting by numbers – he hadn’t set himself a real challenge. If Jeunet is ‘guilty’ of anything with this film, it’s having too much imagination. Is it even possible to have too much imagination? I believe so. And it seems that Jeunet gave himself/was given carte blanche to put everything in his dreams on the screen. The result is stylistically coherent, but again lacks the originality of Jeunet’s earlier films. Jeunet’s satire of the arms trade and his deflating of the pompous arms dealers by literally ridiculing them, is well intentioned, but I have my doubts if it would really work (although it is a nice fantasy). To this extent, there’s no doubt the film’s heart is in the right place. But I never got the feeling that this film had a soul.

Still, I wouldn’t give the film anything less than four stars out of five. To follow the logic of the English tagline for the film: this review has been a little odd, so four out of five for the film should make it a little even.

For now, we must play the waiting game to see what Jeunet, still cinema’s true artisan, still ever the master-craftsman, will come up with next.

- April 2010