MICMACS (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jean Pierre Jeunet
Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon, Julie Ferrier,
André Dussolier, Yolande Moreau, Omar Sy,
Marie-Julie Baup, Nicolas Marié, Michel Crèmandés
This movie opens with a soldier somewhere out in the desert, trying to defuse a land mine. The mine goes off and the soldier is killed. Flash ahead 20 years, and the soldier's son, now grown up and clerking in a Paris video store, gets shot in the head during a robbery. The clerk recovers, with a bullet still lodged in his skull, and joins small band of eccentrics living under a junk yard, where he hatches an elaborate plan to get back at the weapons manufacturers who made both the mine and the bullet. Which could be the setup for a shoot-'em-up action flick, but it's not. It's a comedy, like what you might get if Terry Gilliam made a Buster Keaton movie (or maybe the other way around), by the same guy who made "Amélie" and "Delicatessen". Like John Waters, Jeunet has a real affection for his misfit characters and a cinematic vision that's uniquely his own, and he sees to it that the merchants of death get what's coming to them in a way that's both funny and satisfying. Humanity triumphs, if only for a moment, and only on film. Justice is served.
