With a gleam in his eye, a doctor turns to his bevy of nurses. They’re operating on a man with a bullet lodged in his brain. Our doctor has decided, via coin-toss, not to extract it. “We’ll drive airport security wild!”

His glee is the glee of a creator, turning a regular man into a quirky character just to unleash havoc on the world. That also seems to be the joy of Jean-Pierre Jeunet — the visionary French director of such past hits as the ghoulish Delicatessen and the charming Amelie. Like those films, Micmacs is a kind of fairy tale pasted over a visual smorgasbord, stuffed with characters defined through their quirks. They move like silent film actors — their gestures overblown and adorable. But more than Amelie or Delicatessen, Micmacs seems better suited to display these stylish story-telling techniques. So Jeunet crams more in. The result is more fun to watch. And Micmacs may just be the biggest hit of Jeunet’s career.

Our hero is Bazil (Danny Boon) — a man who, due to that bullet pressing on his brain, has fantasies at inopportune times.  Bazil goes after those who wounded him, but this setup for a straightforward, conventional, revenge-driven action flick  is  interrupted (the bullet!) every now and again with madcap, Amelie-esque moments of fantasy. Scratch that — even stranger and more delightful. While Amelie imagined future deeds to get closer to her love, Bazil’s fantasies are total non-sequiturs — a vision of a soccer game with a landmine hidden somewhere under the field to kill the player who steps on it; a fantastical inquiry into why, when looking at a map, our destination is always in the awkward crease. These fantasies give Jeunet room to play around. And we want him to run wild.

The film opens onto Bazil’s youth as he loses his father to a mine in the Sahara. His grim, gaunt mother mourns while he sits, dumbfounded, between two fat aunts (just one of Jeunet’s many striking tableaus). Thirty years later, Bazil is an under-achieving clerk in a video store who just happens to get shot in the head by a stray bullet. Having lost his job to medical leave, he’s bereft, homeless, and scrounging for dough with a host of clever plots (he lipsyncs to a street performer, standing on the other side of a column, to get half her pay).

But then he finds the “Micmacs” (French for “shenanigans”) — a band of hobos who live outside the city in a trash heap that they’ve constructed into a livable house, full of mechanical gadgets (which I’m sure will be recreated for some sort of Steampunk boutique hotel in Portland)… Inside, Jeunet plants his goofiest characters yet: there’s the tall, gangly writer always tapping away at his typewriter; the contortionist in the fridge; the over-bearing mama perpetually stirring huge vats; and the mechanical “artist” — who recycles the city’s refuse to make ingenious small mechanical sculptures.

It turns out they’re the perfect gang to embark on Bazil’s revenge plot — which is not against the man who shot him (it was a stray, after all!) but against the arms dealers who manufactured the bullet. When he finds the factory he also finds, directly across the street, the arms dealer who made the mine that killed his father. And so, what was a coming-of-age tale is now a full-throttle revenge thriller stuffed with what can only be called “hijinks” or “capers.” Ingenious, mechanical inventions perform even more ingenious tricks. The pranksters shoot human cannons, the contortionist gets folded up in air vents, a sugar cube laced with sleeping pills is dangled — via a very long string — into the coffee cup of a security man.

Retro microphones are dropped through chimneys and delicious shots allow us a peep into every apartment they bypass (a couple with a dog scrunched between them in bed, a classical musician wailing on his bass). All of these “shenanigans” serve to get the arms dealers riled up against eachother. And oh, how we want to see them riled up! They’re wonderful villains, painted sharply in a collection of evil details. For example, one eats shrimps whole, with the shell on, while the other — across the street — peels a plateful, stacks them, and forks them into his mouth in a single bite.

One realizes that the film, which at first seemed sprawling — is actually a very careful critique of 21st century politics. Of course, these arms dealers sell to countries who use weapons “illegally” (if you count any war as legal), thereby fueling genocides and terrorism from the comfort of their splendid desks. War is rendered as blocky, efficient, and stupid. It just takes a couple of geniuses — bankrupted by society — to take them down. And it’s a wonderful 21st century fairy tale.

Micmacs

Directed by John-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Danny Boon, Andrew Dussollier, Nicolas Marie, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Yolande Moreau, Julie Ferrier

French (With English Subtitles)
France (2009)

Opens May 28th in the US