Fridae

Since his first film he co-directed with Marc Caro (Delicatessen), Jean Pierre Jeunet’s films largely deal with the power of imagination, often quite literal. Imagination is shown to have a power that cannot be restrained by the brute force of reality.

Micmacs is best seen as perhaps the capstone to a career dedicated so far to the power of imagination versus the power of brute force. And what more perfect a way to express it than being about a group of creative eccentrics who take on two wealthy arms dealers?

Dany Boon plays Bazil, a video store clerk who lost his father, a minesweeper in Western Sahara, to a landmine manufactured by the Vigilance of Armaments organisation, and later on in a stray shooting gets a bullet manufactured by the Aubanville Arsenal lodged in his brain. As a result of the second, he loses his job. He finds himself making a living as a street performer, and soon joins a group of outcasts living in a place called “Tire-Larigot” led by den mother Mdm Chow; these include Slammer, an ex-con so tough decapitation failed him twice, Calculette, whose name indicates her prodigious mathematical abilities, the Rubber Girl, a contortionist, Buster, a former daredevil, Tiny Pete, a gifted toymaker of sorts, and Remington, a former ethnographer from the Congo who speaks in French proverbs. Being characters in a Jeunet movie, nearly all of them are gifted in a form of the theatrical or circus arts, even “straight man” Bazil has an outsized talent for mime and disguise considering his lowly origins (Dany Boon has a background in mime and comedy after all.)

These talents are put to good use when Bazil discovers the street where both the arms dealers make their headquarters, and in a plot that has been used countless times since Yojimbo , hatch a plan to destroy both factions not through violence, but through numerous escapades of sabotage, subterfuge and the pure power of creativity and play itself.

These sequences are beautifully timed and played out, heist movies and silent comedies are all about the split-second timing of physical action, and in this movie one finds both in a sublime combination. The conventions of movie violence, on the other hand, are satirised in the form of not just the vain, hypocritical arms dealers, but also the menacing henchmen of a deposed African dictator. While most heist movies are fantasies for those with dreams of wealth, Micmacs is a fantasy of the idealist activist, it is perhaps a testament to the power of nonviolent, creative, collective action as the most potent of all instruments for social change.