Micmacs - We Own Paris

With films like "The Fabulous World of Amelie" and "The City of Lost Children", French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has earned a reputation as quite the visionary, his films brimming with fantastic ideas. After his last cinema success "Mathilde - Eine große Liebe" from 2006, Jeunet was offered the directorship for the fifth "Harry Potter" film. But Jeunet turned it down, preferring instead to direct the comedy "Micmacs - We Own Paris", which is now, after some delay, finally in our cinemas.

"Scht`is"-star Dany Boon plays in the comedy the likeable loser Bazil, who seems to be haunted by bad luck since his childhood, when he lost his father to a landmine. Now, twenty years later, things don't look much better for him as he takes a bullet to the head one night by a stupid accident that even surgery can't remove. Every move now can be his last and Bazil is close to giving up on himself completely. But then he meets street vendor Canaille (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who takes him to live with a group of whimsical misfits who have built a little world of their own out of scrap metal parts. With the help of this new family, Bazil seeks revenge on the two rival arms manufacturers responsible for his plight. But as perfect as the plan the crew hatches is, there's one thing Bazil hasn't considered: that this, of all places, is where he'll find the love of his life...

"Micmacs - We Own Paris" is without question an enchanting film whose imagery alone is worth the trip to the cinema. Jeunet conjures up images of Paris on the screen as one has truly never seen them before. The dwelling of Bazil's new "family", built entirely out of scrap metal, is a real masterpiece. Great praise is due here to the film's set designers, but also to the excellent camerawork of the Japanese Tetsuo Nagata ("La vie en rose"), who has captured this imaginative work in magnificent images.

But for all the praise, it must also be critically noted that the endearingly quirky humor, which has long become Jeunet's trademark, has so far seemed a little too strained here. For example, in the character of the pliable Mademoiselle Kautschuk, who is played very charmingly by Julie Ferrier, but whose facial expressions, dominated by eyes that are always wide open, seem too artificial even in the artificial world of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The same goes for most of the characters, who are all somehow charmingly quirky, but who precisely in this quirkiness lack the certain lightness that still adhered to the characters in "Amélie".

But this is admittedly only a minor shortcoming, measured against the imaginative splendor and the many original ideas that this film otherwise offers its viewers. With a great ensemble of actors, some very pretty gags and its engaging visuals, "Micmacs - We Own Paris" is the most amusing and charming plea against arms dealing that one has seen in cinema so far. The fact that a beautiful love story is told along the way and that the whole thing has somehow also become a kind of whimsical family film is a more than pleasant side effect that makes Jeunet's new film all the more worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp