Micmacs
Release: Now showing
Duration: 105 minutes
Rating: M (violence and sexual references)
Whether you are already initiated into the quirky, delightful world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet or are giving a foreign film a try, the intricate, mesmerising Micmacs will leave you salivating for more, and most likely trawling video stores for a second serving of Jeunet’s work.
Like Delicatessen, Jeunet’s latest is dealing with some pretty heavy subject matter. The film begins with a brief insight into the hero Basil’s experience with arms. First off, are the last seconds of his father’s life as he fails to dismantle a landmine in the Sahara. Fast-forward thirty years and Basil is working a mundane job at the video store where he is the unfortunate casualty of the most unlikely gunfight that happens just outside his shop. Although he is shot in the head, Basil manages to recover. What a relief! Sadly, he is also now homeless and unemployed.
It is when Basil is busking on the streets that he is taken in by an unconventional family that, like him, have been discarded by society. Of course, they live at the hard rubbish collection, and of course they just happen to get on fine without the usual worldly possessions. Although I don’t quite remember their names, the unique personalities of the misfits are vividly sketched by the director. There is the mama chook figure who you will remember from Amelie as the landlord, the human canon ball (the lead from Delicatessen), the human calculator who can tell you with precision the mathematical measurements of any object and a sweet inventor that turns their rubbish into objects of beauty.
After Basil joins the family and is given the task of sorting the trash that comes their way when he happens to stop by a street where the arms corporation that is responsible for his father’s death is right across the road from the arms corporation that created the type of bullet that shot him in the head. The average Joe thinks to himself he is going to write an angry letter to both companies about the immorality of their industry. Basil decides he is going to devise a plan to take them both down.
What unfolds, in an Amelie like fashion, are a series of events that you’d swear are devised by an imaginative child’s mind. Justice is simple, satisfying and, oddly, comical as Jeunet directs the film as a whimsical ride.
Unlike some escapist culture, Jeunet’s film would have you aware and sensitive to the fact that the moral of the story is a rather serious one. In one of the last scenes of the film, the truth of the matter hits home hardest when we see what appears to be Middle Eastern women holding framed pictures of their dead or severely injured children: arms corporations exist and succeed at the expense of murder, and more often than not, young soldiers who are somebody’s child, lover, or parent. Unlike some typical Hollywood blockbusters that rely on special effects and advertising to create hype outside of the cinema, Micmacs is something you will continue to talk about two weeks after watching it.
Rosie Pham
