Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009)

Micmacs à tire-larigot is a French crime film first released in 2009, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  The film stars Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Yolande Moreau and André Dussollier.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


When a bullet lodges itself in his brain, Bazil looks set to lose everything.  He survives but after a lengthy stay in hospital he finds he has nothing – no job, no home.  He recalls that his father died whilst trying to disarm a bomb in the Moroccan desert.  If only he could take revenge against those who profit via the armaments industry.  One day, Fate gives him a chance to do just that.  He finds the two companies who are responsible for his father’s death and his own misfortunes and resolves to bring them both down...

For the last five years, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has been conspicuous by his absence.  Now that he is back you wonder whether the wait was worth it.  His latest cinematic extravaganza is a far cry from his sombre WWI drama Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004) - in fact it is practically a return to where he started out, with the surreal blackly comedic Delicatessen (1991).  Here, Jeunet plunges unto a bizarre fantasy world (Paris reimagined via CGI algorithms) in which a weird caper plot unfolds at at such a pace that you will have a job keeping up with it.  Think of it as a virtual reality take on Mission Impossible, with an Exocet missile up its hind quarters.

The expectations that this could be another Delicatessen dissipate within about three minutes of the opening credits.  Micmacs à tire-larigot feels more like a tacky juvenile parody of Jeunet’s work, lacking the intelligence, the poetry and the sheer magic of his previous films.  The characters are ridiculously over-the-top, so much so that they could be replaced by Nick Park animations and you would hardly notice the difference.  For all the frenzy of activity, the plot lacks coherence and substance and, compared with Jeunet’s enchanting Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001), is a tedious affair that does its best to alienate the spectator almost from the word go.

Whilst the film has a few fleeting moments of brilliance and is visually spectacular, it is clearly a lesser work than previous Jeunet offerings, generally chaotic and humourless.  The cast (which includes some very capable performers) fail to make their characters more than what they are - grotesque comic book caricatures - and the mise-en-scène is so gratuitously over the top that you end up longing for the soothing balm of an Andrzej Zulawski film.  Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his crew clearly had a great deal of fun making this febrile adolescent romp, but not everyone will have anything like as much fun watching it.

© James Travers 2010

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