Copernicus From TIFF: Jeunet's MICMACS A TIRE-LARIGOT

Merrick here...
Copernicus saw MICMACS at TIFF and sent in his thoughts. This one's from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who brought us DELICATESSEN, AMELIE, A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT, ALIEN RESURRECTION, and...of course...CITY OF LOST CHILDREN.
Here's Copernicus:

The best Jean-Pierre Jeunet films are tinted, ornate fantasylands inhabited by eccentric dreamers. In these surreal playgrounds, characters will often have a series of thoughts or even an obsession, about some minute and easily overlooked piece of the world, such as discarded booth photos, a sweetly savored taste, or the wear pattern in a stairway. They use overwrought contraptions to achieve simple tasks. Jeunet uses these moments to coax magic from the mundane, and each detail becomes another quirk that fleshes out heartbreakingly human characters. From these little threads of merriment he weaves a magic carpet and takes you on a ride straight into his brain. MICMACS A TIRE-LARIGOT, which just had the world premiere in Toronto, is in just this AMELIE and CITY OF LOST CHILDREN style, and it is another masterpiece. Jeunet and star Dany Boon were at the premiere and got a standing ovation from the huge Roy Thompson Hall Gala crowd. The story starts with a prologue involving the wartime dismantling of a landmine with explosive results. Cut to modern-day Bazil (Dany Boon), a video store clerk whose father was the unlucky blast recipient. In a freak accident, Bazil takes a bullet to the brain. It doesn’t kill him but it does make him have fits the he can only quell by remembering strange lists or recalling Jeunet-esque obsessions. As a result of his long recovery, he soon finds himself homeless and unemployed, but survives by giving street performances that veer dangerously close to mime, but are done so well that you almost begin to understand the French obsession with it. Before long Bazil is introduced to a band of misfits living in what amounts to a cave constructed with cast-off junk that has been repurposed into whimsical construction material. Each member of the gang has a special talent -- one is great at math, one is a chef (hey, this is France!), one is a contortionist, and another is good at building Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. You’ll recognize some familiar faces, like Dominique Pinon, from previous Jeunet outings. By chance, Bazil learns about arms dealers who made the bullet in his skull and the land mine that killed his father. So he recruits his merry tribe of eccentrics to pull a series of stunts to infuriate the arms dealers and play them against one another. And as if taking spiritual direction from the patron saint of would-be trappers, Wile E. Coyote, here the elaborate schemes don’t always go off as planned. Instead of MICMACS, I think they should have called this OCEANS 14 and doubled the box office. The parallels with the Soderberg franchise are numerous: there’s the gang, each with specialties, a great ensemble cast, moustache-twirling villains (metaphorically speaking), prankster high jinks, and an overarching sense of fun. Of course here we’re in Jeunet-land where the contortionists are extra-bendy and you know that any character with human cannonball training is going to have to use it. Dany Boon does incredible physical comedy as Bazin, calling to mind legends like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. In fact, the film as a whole essentially works as a silent film – there are scenes without dialog, and Jeunet is a master at visual storytelling. He is obsessive about detail, color, and composition – no small feat when you have as many things going on in the background as he does. You could take almost any frame from his better works and hang it in the Louvre, and MICMACS is no exception. Like any great work of art, this isn’t exactly our world, it’s our world interpreted. And a world filtered through the eyes and imagination of Jeunet is a world I’d love to live in. While I can't do that, at least I can visit it for two hours, and that will have to do until the next one.