There are many ways to depict evil on screen. Many ways to show not just the evil itself, but the subtler malfunctions of the soul that make a person evil. In MICMACS, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (AMELIE), has chosen to parse it with shrimp. Specifically, the way the two arms dealers of the story attack the crustaceans on their respective plates at lunch. Marconi (Nicolas Marie) tears them apart, discarding the head and eating everything else, including the legs, with a feral abandon, tossing away what little is left without regard for where it lands. The other de Fenouillet (Andre Dussollier), with methodical symmetrically arranges the carefully de-shelled creatures on his plate, naked and helpless, before gorging on them with a similar feral approach. That they will be taken on by the least of their victims seems not only right, but poetic, as poetic as the film as a whole.
Their adversary is Bazil (Dany Boon), a random bystander, emphasis on random, who was deprived of a childhood by one dealer when his father was blown up by a landmine, and a future by the other when, thirty years later, a freak accident lodged a bullet manufactured by the other in his brain. There was nothing personal in any of it, but left homeless and unemployed, it certainly makes no difference to Bazils dire state.
After barely eking out a living on the streets, he is taken in by the eponymous Micmacs, a crew of recyclers of all things discarded, both things and people, living under a mountain of junk, the which they have converted into a cozy home. They are a properly eccentric group led by Mama Chow (Yolande Moreau), who replaces her lost children with her adoptees, a contortionist with a penchant for refrigerators (Julie Ferrier), a human calculator with a romantic streak (Marie-Julie Baup), a writer who speaks only in clichés (Omar Sy), a Guinness world record wannabe (Dominique Pinon), a man who cheated the guillotine (Jean-Pierre Marielle), and a master of mechanics (Michel Cremandes) whose intricate machines are as purpose driven and whimsical as the story is one of coincidence and serious intent.
The plan is as well-crafted as it is convoluted, with a plethora of details no sane person would include, but so precisely intertwined that the sum of the parts make each one indispensable. Each individual move, designed to start by merely pitting the arms dealers against one another, is zen-like in the way it flows with the essential quirks and failings of each target. When the dealers attempt to plot against one another, it’s heavy-handed, obvious, and as mean-spirited as they themselves are. Certainly, they are not fun to watch, and watching the Micmacs scheme unfold is more than just fun, its a delight on any level.
Jeunet uses cinematic idioms from Hollywood’s heyday, as well as an archival Rudolph Steiner score, to heighten the surreal conceit of the story. Performances are arch, but evincing a warm gentleness from the Micmacs, and a mustache-twirling archness from the villains. The audience is not meant to take this at face value, this is a fable, and one concocted on an epic scale. It’s also one suffused with a charm and whimsy that is utterly without cynicism or irony. Instead, there is a thundering innocence to the Micmacs that is in high contrast, but never quite at odds, with Jeunet’s vicious social satire. Indeed, he seems to be making a fascinating and novel point that it is only a pure, childlike innocence that conquer evil precisely because it is so removed from it. So pure are these folk that Bazil can be sheltering under a piece of cardboard for the night on the banks of the Seine and still smile sweetly while waving to partygoers on a passing bateau-mouche, believably delighted in their fortune, and the contortionist must ask for a definition of what constitutes blackmail material.
It’s that element that makes fate more than chance seem to drive the action. The flip of a surgeons coin that decides to leave the bullet in Bazil’s head rather than risk the surgery that might leave him a vegetable, sudden and unexpected death at any moment notwithstanding. The mishap that allows Bazil not just to find himself in front of both arms factories, but also to be in possession of the vital clues that links them to what happened to him.
MICMACS employs a childlike glee, not unlike those of its heroes, as it unfolds. Musings on the existence of pygmy midgets, sight gags that use sleight-of-hand as well as slapstick, puns that encompass classic poets and action stars, as well as the most witty and humane elements to be found in Chaplin, Tati, and Keaton coalesce effortlessly in a story that is as simple as it is erudite.
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