A Little Joie-de-Vivre

There are only a handful of directors who create such distinctive worlds that you can recognise their films instantly – Tim Burton is one that immediately comes to mind, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet is without doubt another. The director of Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and most famously Amélie, invents a universe populated by misfits, where facial expressions dominate over dialogue and the scenery evokes an atmosphere of charm and nostalgia. Jeunet’s films are also characterised by innovative set pieces – one scene in Delicatessen uses the sound of squeaking bed springs to set a rhythm that all the residents in the building become entwined in.

In 2001 Amélie was a surprise hit, appealing to audiences the world over, as Jeunet comments: “I remember sitting alone wondering who would pay to see it and then suddenly Audrey Tautou’s face was everywhere”. Micmacs, his latest film, which is out this month, comes 5 years after Jeunet’s last (and much less successful) feature A Very Long Engagement, which saw the director take a more serious approach to storytelling. Micmacs however is closer in tone to his earlier works – uplifting, idiosyncratic and very playful. It tells the story of Bazil, who is orphaned after his father dies in a landmine explosion. Several years later, whilst working in a video shop, Bazil is hit by a stray bullet. Convinced that the arms dealers who have made the weapons are out to get him, he plots to destroy their empire with the help from his newly acquired friends – a bunch of misfits who make their living salvaging and recycling items they find on the scrap heap where they live. Amusing and outrageous antics ensue as the group’s plans are rolled into action.

Jeunet says his initial inspiration for the film came when he was making The City of Lost Children, “I was editing [that film] in Saint Cloud next to the Dassault arms manufacturing factories and used to eat in the same restaurant as their engineers. They seemed pretty strait-laced but still normal friendly guys – but I couldn’t help looking at them and thinking that they have spent their day creating and manufacturing weapons to kill and destroy as many human beings as possible. So that stuck with me. But I wanted to make a comedy, not some serious intellectual piece, so I thought that pitting them against their opposites – a gang of scavenging second hand car dealers, people who recycle cars and abandoned objects – might be very nice.”

At the core of the film is Dany Boon’s performance as Bazil and while he may be an unfamiliar face to audiences in the UK he is well known in France and in fact is the country’s highest paid actor. He began his career as a mime artist, a talent which is utilised in many scenes which pay homage to the stars of the silent era such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Surprisingly Boon was not the original choice for the role: “I wrote the part for Jamel [Debbouze, who played Lucien in Amélie]” says Jeunet. “But he wanted time off from working. So I immediately called on Dany who initially said no. So I persuaded him to screen test and we had a great time and he agreed. Of course now if you watch the film you cannot imagine anybody [else] on this planet playing the role. But the same happened with Audrey [Tautou] for Amélie. Originally we wanted Emily Watson but she declined and Audrey stepped in. Now who could imagine anyone else other than Audrey as Amélie?”

As well as an abundance of references to silent films, Jeunet also identifies a host of other influences including Sergio Leone, the director of spaghetti westerns such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, the original Mission Impossible television series and even Pixar animations. “I wanted to make a film that had this band of avengers made up of the characters like the crazy toys in Toy Story where each has a special talent or eccentric little trait that is different from the rest,” he says. There is also an imaginative scene at the start of the film which matches excerpts from The Big Sleep to Bazil’s own pivotal involvement in a shooting. Yet for all its various inspirations there’s no denying that Micmacs still feels essentially like a Jeunet film: it is light-hearted, endlessly inventive and will no doubt charm the socks of audiences when it is released on the big screen.