Dany Boon & Yolande Moreau

Looming, impish eyes; gliding cameras; whimsy aggressive enough to make you swear off whimsy for a month:

It is time once again for a film from the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known on these shores for "Amelie."

 

Near the beginning of that picture the young heroine flicks a domino, which ticks the next domino and so on. That's Jeunet's strategy in a nutshell. Life, his movies suggest, are simply a series of fanciful, fated causes and effects, and Rube Goldberg devices set into motion.

Jeunet's material has veered from the darker, spikier landscapes of "Delicatessen" (his first feature) and "The City of Lost Children" to the outsized confections of "Amelie." The director's latest is "Micmacs," which has drawn outlandishly generous comparisons to Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Its story hinges on a homeless former video store clerk with a bullet lodged in his brain after a near-fatal shooting who falls in with a circus-like troupe of junkyard dealers. Bazil, the adoptee, vows revenge on the munitions magnates whose landmines killed his father.

The plotting ("Follow me, I know a family who'll adopt you.") exists in order to set up the next chain-reaction sight gag, which will dazzle some and leave others stone-faced. As Bazil and his pals undergo a series of "Mission: Impossible" scenarios, putting the screws to their quarry, Jeunet creates a world populated by human cannonballs and contortionists and ageless waifs whose faces are never uninteresting. Jeunet's film, co-written by the director and Guillaume Laurant, is one of high polish and prodigious creativity. I found it exhausting.

For me, the mechanics or even the (excellent) designs are not enough. Jeunet's archness keeps conventional empathy or engagement at bay, and by design maintains a tone of artificiality. (It's akin to Terry Gilliam on a mixture of sedatives and Cognac.) When the whirligig style works, as it did in "Amelie," it's because a performer such as Audrey Tautou is able to personalize things. As Bazil, Dany Boon does everything required of him. So does Yolande Moreau (Seraphine), who plays the matriarch of the junkyard denizens. And yet they come off as pushy and monotonous. "Micmacs" does not deserve its R rating (it's more of a PG-13 from any angle) but audiences deserve a richer fable.

 

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MPAA rating: R (for some sexuality and brief violence).

Running time: 1:45.

Cast: Dany Boon (Bazil); Yolande Moreau (Mama Chow); Julie Ferrier (Elastic Girl); Omar Sy (Remington); Andre Dussollier (Fenouillet); Nicolas Marie (Marconi).

Credits: Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; written by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant; produced by Frederic Brillion, Gilles Legrand and Jeunet. A Sony Pictures Classics release.