No alms for arms

Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) is the latest unapologetically cinematic outing from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001), Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004).

It is a satire on the arms trade – Dany Boon heads a splendid cast that includes André Dussolier, Yolande Moreau and Dominique Pinon in a daring, subversive comedy about one man’s plan (helped by his friends, of course) to bring two large weapons manufacturers down.

Few directors are more imaginative and inventive at creating their own distinctive on-screen worlds (see Delicatessen (1991)) – Dany Boon plays Bazil, in what at first sight appears to be a miscasting, as Boon’s statuesque and imposing form seems distinctly at odds with his put-upon protagonist, who suffers mishap after mishap, misery upon misery.

However, as the nature of proceedings gradually takes shape, Boon’s physicality increasingly fits Bazil to perfection. Jeunet’s set-up is a model of simplicity – a French soldier is killed by a landmine in Algeria, and his wife loses her mind to grief.

His little boy (that would be Bazil) is left with a convent, but escapes in a laundry van.

Thirty years on, he’s manning a video store when a drive-by shooting leaves him with a bullet in his brain, without a job or a flat, and homeless.

And who is to blame? The two arms companies who sold the landmine and the bullet, of course…

There is a lot of whimsy here (maybe too much, ocassionally), but the film nevertheless effectively straddles the dark and lighter tones of Jeunet’s earlier work, with a wonderfully comic-book cast of eccentrics standing four-square with a far darker underside, which reveals the preposterous and dangerous ethics that appear to permeate the arms industry.

By and large, a bullseye.

105 mins. In French.