Scavenging Angel
Micmacs, the latest movie from French arthouse director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is about an underground group of human scavengers. Like the director’s previous masterworks, Delicatessen and Amelie, the film showcases his celebrated visual style.
Tara Brady, 02 Mar 2010
It’s not quite in the nouvelle vague league but contemporary French cinema is not short of international players. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine our cultural landscape without the likes of Jacques Audiard, Gaspar Noé, or Laurent Cantet. None of these chaps, however, could hope to match one Jean-Pierre Jeunet at the box-office, on the awards circuit or as a global auteur brand.
Ever since Mr. Jeunet burst onto the scene with 1991’s Delicatessen, a spectacular fantasy co-created with his erstwhile collaborator, Marc Caro, his bizarre fables have enlivened our arthouses and multiplexes. The filmmaker behind such niche hits such as City of Lost Children and A Very Long Engagement has scored mainstream converts through Alien:Resurrection and the wildly successful crossover hit, Amélie, triumphs which may explain the bidding frenzy that erupted around Micmacs, the latest flick to bear the director’s distinctive visual imprimatur.
Based around an underground community of human scavengers, Micmacs à tire-larigot (to use its full French title) presents an Aladdin’s Cave of grotty wonders, both literally and figuratively as M. Jeunet’s regular set designer, Aline Bonetto, turns the style up to 11.
Sitting in London’s Soho Hotel, the director shakes his head in mock disapproval: “My set designer likes to surprise me,” he says. “Sometimes it’s weird. When I first saw the set for Amélie I said ‘But it’s all red’. I did not know what to think. Okay, it could be red. Maybe I can work with that. By the end of the shooting day, I was saying ‘Look, it’s all red, isn’t it fantastic?’ Sometimes you need time with Aline’s sets for it to make sense.”
Micmacs, a whimsical all-ages fable, sees a merry band of rejects take on the military-industrial complex with gadgets build from garbage and elaborate cartoon schemes. The sight-gags are ingenious and the tomfoolery is broad, but it’s the film’s inimitable look that steals the show.
“I start with a strong concept”, says M. Jeunet. “I try to start with a strong concept! For this film it was a mix of three different ideas. I wanted to make a film with strange and funny looking people, like the seven dwarves in Snow White or the toys in Toy Story. Then I sit down with my scriptwriter (Guillaume Laurent) and we take down many notes and keep the best ideas. That is why we end up with so many details.”
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