With the 83rd Oscars—the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences’ annual tentpole event—barely weeks from now, it will now be a decade since the edition remembered the most by majority of Indians. That was when Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan failed to bowl out the rest of the competition in the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category. Equally disheartened across the globe that year, and since then, has been an ever-increasing number of cine-lovers, who just cannot fathom how Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s utterly charming Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (aka Amelie) did not win enough hearts at the Academy to win the trophy in the same category.
A self-taught filmmaker, Jeunet belongs to a dying breed of directors—the ‘auteur’ (or author). A much-influential film theory that evolved in the 1950s in the seminal French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, the auteur theory argues that just like authors use the pen to express themselves in literature; each film, too, should reflect its director’s own vision. One can view this as the filmic equivalent of expressionism in painting—with both putting emphasis on the creator’s (painter/filmmaker) subjective perspective.
The hallmark of an auteur is that it takes the viewer only a couple of moments to guess the director correctly, every time he/she views any instance from his/her body of work. In other words, an auteur leaves his/her signature behind in his/her films.
Jeunet’s signature is the way he digitally manipulates colour in every frame. Like a true auteur, he has stuck to his trademark visual aesthetic in his latest offering—Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009), which roughly translated into English, means ‘Non-stop shenanigans’.
Bazil (Dany Boon) is a thirty-something video store clerk, who can recite dialogue from films from memory. As a kid, he lost his father—a soldier—in Morocco to a landmine. While that particular weapon of war broke his heart, another product of arms manufacturers—the revolver—leaves behind a much more apparent scar. A stray bullet from a shootout that occurs right in front of his video store hits him right in the head and lands in his brain. Gauging that operating on Bazil might have fatal consequences; a surgeon decides to leave the bullet where it is.
Stripped off his job and ousted from his home, Bazil spends two months roaming the streets begging, till he meets Slammer, an ex-convict. Slammer, aware of the fact that the bullet could pop Bazil’s brain any second, tells him that he knows of a family who will still be willing to adopt him. Slammer introduces Bazil to a motley crew of individuals, who live in a junk yard. There’s Mama Chow—the cook, who is also in charge of recruiting; Calculator, a young girl capable of conducting complex mental calculations in an instant; Tiny Pete, who can create wondrous automatons using scrap metal; Remington, a former ethnographer from Congo, who speaks in old-world clichés; Elastic Girl, a contortionist; and Buster (played by Jeunet’s perennial favourite Dominique Pinon), a human cannonball. They spend their time salvaging defective stuff. No wonder then, they welcome Bazil.
One fine day, while collecting junk, Bazil realises, to his utter amazement, that the company that manufactured the landmine that blew his father into smithereens and the organisation that was behind the bullet that is now a ticking bomb in his brain, have their headquarters on opposite sides of the same street. Like Amelie, who decided to take matters in her own hands to teach the local vegetable vendor—who repeatedly ill-treated his dim-witted employee—a lesson; Bazil, does not get mad at the CEOs of the two companies. He, too, decides to get even, while being ably assisted by his family of six.
With the sombre topic of international arms dealing as the backdrop, and the morbid situation of the protagonist, who has lead in his head, Micmacs could easily have turned into a dark, brooding thriller. But similar to Jeunet’s characters, who never get bogged down by their circumstances, and his frames, which show the world in a different hue than usual, the film does a volte-face and takes on an amusing avatar. Akin to The Big Sleep (1946)—a film the adult Bazil was watching when we first see him on screen—which deals more with the process of a criminal investigation and ponders less on the results; Micmacs, too, is more about how the magnificent seven go about extracting revenge, than the final outcome.
It is obvious that like the protagonist of his latest film, Jeunet, too, is a movie aficionado. There are numerous references to other films strewn throughout Micmacs. Look out for Bazil begging inside a subway station, lip syncing to a female singer on the other side of a pillar, who is oblivious of his presence, in a direct homage to the Jean Hagen lip syncing to Debbie Reynolds sequence in Singin’ in the Rain (1952); the ode to Chaplin when an obviously hungry Bazil is restrained by his pride from approaching a woman, who is distributing food packets, and he feigns that he is waiting for a cab; the Buster Keaton-ish moment while cleaning windows and being caught snooping; the characters speaking about Scarface (1983) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971); the shot of Buster zooming through the air a la The Rocketeer (1991); the harking back to the famous Russian roulette sequence in The Deer Hunter (1978); split screens similar to De Palma’s Mission Impossible (1996); and at least two references to Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): a buzzing fly, and the way in which one CEO ends up on the shoulders of another in the same manner as Harmonica’s brother in Leon’s masterpiece. Not only that, in a particularly ingenious sequence, by using sound effects, Jeunet succeeds in fooling the two antagonists and the audience alike.
Other than the surreal tints, what brings Jeunet’s films alive is the quirkiness of his secondary characters. Micmacs, too, follows this tradition. So, we have a surgeon who flips a coin to decide whether to operate or not; a CEO who quotes poetry during his speeches; his rival, whose collection includes Marilyn Monroe’s molar and Churchill’s nail clippings; a security personnel, who has worn the same sweater for three decades…and the list goes on.
The only other filmmaker of this generation who is successfully delving in fantasy is the Spanish auteur Guillermo Del Toro (of Pan’s Labyrinth fame). However,
while Del Toro focuses on bringing out the macabre side, Jeunet highlights the magical in the mundane.
Possibly, the most apt way to apprise Jeunet’s body of work is indicated by Elastic Girl during a conversation with Bazil. While Bazil dismisses her as ‘twisted’, she begs to differ. She exclaims, in return that she is just a ‘sensitive soul in a flexible body’.
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