The struggle goes back to the beginning of time, or at least the begining of motion pictures, as writers and directors have matched humor against horror, farce against fear, laughter of the living against the tears of death. Tragedy usually wins out.
But
in a movie like "Micmacs," we can laugh, and giggle, and
even stop to think a little. A French import, whose full title is
"Micmacs a Tire-Larigot," which means "Non-Stop
Madness," or so the movie-makers say, is a little thin, but
writer-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has created a cast of such loony,
laughable characters, and a plot that is unabashedly impossible but a
wonderful source of "What if. . . ."
Bazil
(Dany Boon) is a man who hates bullets, and properly so. We see his
father blown up by a land mine. Later, we see the grown-up Bazil
working in a movie rental shop, watching Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall in "The Big Sleep," dubbed into French, when a
accidental bullet from outside pierces his forehead, and since
removal surgery is considered too dangerous for practitioners of
government-run medical plans, it remains in his head. But he loses
his job while hospitalized, and moves to a junkyard hideout where a
group of strange characters have taken up residence. Without a job,
Bazil worries about ammunition and discovers that France's two
largest factories are located across the street from one another.
The
caricatures in charge are Nicolas Thibault de Fenouillet (Andre
Dussollier) and Francois Martini (Nicolas Marie). De Fenouillet's
hobby is collecting body parts from deceased celebrities from Marilyn
Monroe to Benito Mussolini.
Bazil's
buddies are a rare and wonderful group, like Buster the Human
Cannonball (Dominique Pinon) who longs to again snuggle into a gun
barrel and wait for the explosion he loves to hear. Or Tambouille
(Julia Farrier), a contortionist who twists her supple body into
imaginative, thought-provoking shapes and angles. Or Calculette
(Marie-Julie Baup), the cute, wide-eyed human calculator, dividing
and multiplying and doing square roots while we sit in silent wonder.
Or Petite Pierre (Michel Cremades), known as Tiny Pete, who builds
and plays with complex mechanical devices of the sort an artist named
Rube Goldberg used to draw. Raindrop (A) would fall into Spoon (B)
and in a series of wheels, flags, belts, gears and other devices,
eventually an egg (R) would fall into frying pan (S) and so on, right
to the breakfast table. Or Remington (Omar Sy), a tall African who
speaks in a blend of mixed metaphors, mispronunciations and
Malapropisms that gave fits to whomever created the subtitles. And
then there's Yolande Moreau, as Mama Chow, who runs the residence.
The
entire movie is–delightfully–a step or two off center and into a
bended reality. OId Max Steiner movie scores provide a background
that emphasizes the one-off quality and keeps making us think of "The
Big Sleep" scenes just before Bazil is shot. Jeunet only falls
short because it is impossible to create this world that all of us
can only visit, and his excursions are warm, rich and totally
engaging.
"Micmacs"
opens today
–Joe