Micmacs, Jean-Pierre Jeunet latest film, is another brilliantly surreal and idiosyncratic work in the vein of his previous films Delicatessen and Amelie.  The film follows a group of outcasts and oddballs that band together in a scrapyard to get revenge on two arms dealers, who left their newest member, Bazille (Danny Boon), with a bullet lodged in his head and a deceased father.  They come up with some brilliant and hilarious ways to play the two arms dealers against each other,  by making them think that the other is going to greater and greater lengths to sabotage the others business.

    The film is shot is Jeunet’s usual colour enriched style that gives the film a slightly oversaturated and whimsical feel.  The humour is fairly dry throughout and often relies on sight gags that not everyone will find particularly funny.  A lot of the humour also comes from puns and wordplay that don’t translate well and seem to be let down by inaccurate subtitling form time to time.  One character who especially suffers from this is Remington, who seems only able to speak in turns of phrase, spouting one after the other to get across what he means.  The translation makes him seem more like a hack writer whereas in French he is more witty and verbose.

    The cast are all uniformly suburb and fans of Amelie and Delicatessen will recognize a few of Jeunet’s usual cast.  At one point Jeunet even references himself, as Bazil drops a microphone down a chimney to eavesdrop on an arms dealer, he drops it in the wrong one and hears two people playing violin and saw, as seen in Delicatessen.

    It is hard for me to find fault with the film, especially as it’s has style of humour that I love. The film is superbly shot, directed, acted, and contains a huge wealth of brilliant set pieces and surreal visual asides.  However people who don’t really get that style of humour probably will find fairly little to enjoy.

    Despite the films subject matter being revenge and to a large extent the indifference of arms dealers with regards to the people that are on the receiving end of their products, the film doesn’t aim to paint them as two-dimensional characters but rather similarly eccentric people to the ones in the micmacs group. 

    There is also a refreshing lack of political comment on the ethics etc of arms dealers; they are played purely as villains in a personal rather than an ethical sense.  Though the film is billed as a satire, it is one in a fairly broad sense and the satirical elements don’t always translate very well. 

   Fans of Jeunet and French films in generally will immediately warm to film and love the humour, but anyone expecting a more mainstream affair in the vein of Amelie or the darker cult side of Jeunet may end up slightly confused as to the films intentions and how they are supposed to respond.

4/5 Stars