Micmacs

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs (Micmacs à tire-larigot) opened in 2009 and was nominated for the César for Best Film and Best Director. The film consolidated Jeunet's continuing visual-fantastical register that had carried through Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, Amélie and A Very Long Engagement. Working with longtime collaborators Bruno Delbonnel (cinematography) and Marc Caro (production design), Jeunet built a film whose technical commitment is among his most exuberantly elaborate.

Bazil (Dany Boon, the most successful French commercial-comedy actor of the period in his most-discussed art-cinema lead) is a Paris video-store clerk with a bullet lodged in his brain, the consequence of being caught in a stray-bullet street incident outside his shop. Released from hospital with a cardboard box of belongings, he ends up living with a band of eccentric junk-heap inventors operating out of an abandoned-scrapyard underground community. He sets out to bring down the two arms manufacturers responsible for the bullet that has lodged in his brain, and the landmine that killed his father in North Africa decades earlier.

The film operates as broad-comic revenge-caper and sustained Jeunet visual-design exercise in the kind of register the director had been refining across two decades. André Dussollier and Nicolas Marié play the two arms-manufacturer antagonists. Raphaël Beau and Max Steiner's score (the latter incorporating actual classical-Hollywood archival music), Aline Bonetto's production design, and the sustained ensemble of French character-actors as the underground-scrapyard inhabitants combine into a film that is one of Jeunet's warmest works.