About MicmacsDirected by Jean-Pierre Jeunet - Movie Review Example

The film Micmacs by Jean-Pierre Jeunet may not be as much liked as his earlier films like “Amelie” or that world war epic, “A Very Long Engagement”. But still this film too has a Jeunet touch. Micmacs is about the hopeless life of Brazil, a clerk in a video store in Paris. Brazil, very energetically and comically presented by Dany Boon, is made an orphan when his father, a military bomb disposal expert gets killed in African Sahara in 1979, while trying to dismantle a mine. After the death of his father his mother gets mentally derailed and Brazil lands in a catholic orphanage.

He escapes from there and takes up the job in the video shop. One night while spending time leisurely in the video shop he gets caught in a cross fire in the gang war in the street. A bullet lodges in his skull. In the surgery table a surgeon explains different options before him and comically invites a nurse to toss a coin and decide the possible option. The toss decides that the bullet be allowed to stay in the skull. With the bullet in his skull Brazil can go on living; he will be fully conscious though he may get brain storms.

But he can die anytime. From the hospital he is thrown back to the street, without job and shelter. He starts performing in the street, with his impersonations of Charlie Chaplin, the eternal tramp of Cinema. During one of his performances he comes across a bearded old lag, an expert criminal called Slammer. This acquaintance leads him to a bunch of outsiders who live under a garbage yard. They live among the heaps of discarded objects symbolizing how discarded they are from life itself. The group includes the Elastic Girl (“a sensible soul in a flexible body”) who is a contortionist, a black ethnographer named Remington, a human cannonball named Buster along with the mother of the den Mama Chow whose daughters have disappeared.

When Brazil decides to take revenge against the weapon manufactures for the two weapons that almost destroyed his life --- the mine that killed his father and the bullet he is carrying in his skull – the lives of his new friends get a sense of purpose. Brazil sets out the two weapon manufactures to play against each other. These villains are cynical, immoral and absurd and so easy to get played against each other. The adventure for revenge is very funny. One sequence is this: Brazil is eavesdropping on the roof of the house of a man when he feels like sneezing.

The situation is so tricky that he avoids sneezing by diverting his attention to completely pointless things like “Oh Pigmies! are there dwarfs among pigmies” and “ Zebras are white with black strips or black with white strips?” The gang’s plan to get into one of the weapon manufactures mansion by avoiding the security camera is more hilarious. They hire a prostitute and her boy friend who are supposed to make love in an apartment with an open window opposite the mansion. The security guard turns the camera to look at the love making couple.

Brazil and his crew sneak through without being watched .The Elastic girl gets into the weapon manufacturer’s room and inserts a sugar pill which is drugged into his coffee. These scenes are magical on the screen, though bizarre to logic. The film till now is a fantasy. But the final scene brings the plot into reality. The film ends with the world laughing at the villains in the You Tube! The film is lit in a hallucinary style, with the day scenes looking golden and night scenes dreamy. The scenes are shot with lenses that disconcert the viewer.

The Mise -en- scene is lush, compositions beautiful, with very measured camera movements. The cast is fantastic too. It is rated R because of the violent content and imagery. Simulated sex, bloody imagery and female nudity also contribute to this rating. “When film is not a document, it is dream" Says Ingmar Bergman (The Magic Lantern, PP73).Micmacs is a bizarre dream of visual jokes and delightful idiosyncrasies, though extravagant and absurd. “To get even, it helps to be little odd” seems to be the message.

------------------------------- Sources referred: 1) Bergman Ingmar, The Magic Lantern, Translated from Swedish by Joan Tate, Penguin Books, London 1988