Micmacs

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s intricately antic Micmacs hurls gears, gizmos and other trash-heap objets d’art at the audience. It’s aggressively and whimsically retro, like a heaping second helping of his early-’90s black comedy Delicatessen. Instead of the enchanted fairyland of his smash hit Amélie, Jeunet burrows into the Parisian scrap-yard lair of the Micmacs, a band of outcasts with no superpowers but with ingenious uses for old junk. Movie-quoting video-store clerk Bazil (Dany Boon) joins them after a nasty encounter with a bullet; that, plus his father’s prior land-mine mishap, has him vowing revenge on two rival arms manufacturers. The Micmacs spring into action. Magnets, alarm clocks, string and jars of wasps are the Micmacs’ preferred weaponry — the team embodies Jeunet’s love of the handmade and the improvised as opposed to the cold technology of the munitions makers. (Though, in one concession to our times, Jeunet does allow the Micmacs to use YouTube.) Allusions are made to recent European arms deals in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but Micmacs is more fantasy than violent revenge tale. And its pleasing curlicues, like a bouquet of spoons, linger long after the predictable outcome.