Micmacs
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
With: Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon, André Dussollier
12A, 105 mins, Subtitled
Micmacs is the story of Bazil (Dany Boon) and his quest for revenge. Revenge for the death of his father and for the bullet lodged in his head. He is aided and abetted by group of people each with their own set of unique skills.
Sounds gritty and a tad formulaic? Far from it.
Micmacs is the new film from the writer and director of Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and just like Amélie it revels in chance, fortune and flights of fancy.
Bazil’s enemies are two arms companies, conveniently located opposite each other on a Paris street. He sets about playing them off against each other with the help of a ‘family’ of vagabonds, amongst them a contortionist, a human cannonball and an ethnographer from Congo with a penchant for clichés. Bazil does so with verve, imagination and a great deal of luck, much like Amelié found and spread love.
And like Amélie the screen is alive with colour, bathed in the light of an eternal autumnal eve with the CGI used delicately to enhance Jeunet’s hyper-reality.
Micmacs is a fabulous, warming film, with a little romance, a little raunchiness, a lot of laughs and a big dollop of surrealism, a meeting of Dali and Chaplin if you will. It twists ‘C’est la vie’ from defeatism into a celebration.
After premiering at Toronto in September and released in France in October, Micmacs finally goes on general release in the UK this Friday (February 26th) to brighten up this never-ending winter.
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In a tweet - Micmacs = Surreal Gallic take on Ocean's 11 with tramps.
