[With Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs screening as part of SXSW 2010 we now re-post our review of the film from it's debut in Toronto.]

Disappointing not because it's horrible - which it very definitely is not - but because it's lazy, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs A Tire-Larigot feels less like the return to classic form that he promised than it does the product of a man ticking check boxes on a list of what makes a Jeunet film.  Too bad everyone somehow forgot that a compelling story is required if anyone is going to care and that a compelling story requires compelling characters.

Dany Boon is Bazil - a man essentially orphaned in childhood when his father is killed and his mother suffers a breakdown, a man destined to a life of menial jobs thanks to a lack of education.  Or, at least, he would have been destined to a life of menial jobs if he hadn't lost the one he had after being struck in the head by a stray bullet, a bullet still lodged in his brain. 

Unemployed and homeless - his apartment was given away along with his job during his lengthy hospital stay - Bazil ends up on the streets, scraping together a meager existence until he finds himself adopted by a strange collection misfits who live together in a sort of subterranean warren in the depths of a junk yard, a yard from which they scavenge and restore equipment both practical and whimsical.  In his adopted family there is the ex-con, the boisterous mother hen, the walking calculator, the contortionist, the artist-inventor, the human calculator and the guy who seems to have no distinguishing characteristics.  And life is good with this adopted family, if somewhat aimless, until Bazil discovers by chance the manufacturers of the weapons that killed his father and put a bullet in his brain - the two firms standing across the road from one another, their owners living a life of luxury.  And suddenly Bazil has purpose.  He will bring these two down.

As you go through Jeunet's work - particularly his early work - there are certain key elements that stand out.  The use of color filters.  The love of complex cause-and-effect gags.  The underground settings.  Circus performers.  Hand made props and gadgets.  A gently absurd approach to both humor and violence, often in the same shot.  And all of these elements are very much at play in Micmacs, the film every ounce a gorgeously realized picture that could only have come from Jeunet. 

But what Micmacs lacks is the human connection that makes Jeunet's best work sing.  There is no Amelie here.  Even in more extreme work like Delicatessen there is a compelling human heart, but here it seems as though everybody is all quirk and no character.  Even accepting the odd rules of Jeunet's world, none of these people seem real enough to invest anything in emotionally.  And without the emotional core the film simply becomes a string of quirky set pieces - very fun ones, to be sure - linked by bits of filler, none of which ever comes together into a particularly strong whole.

Though still enormous proficient technically and still possessed of one of the most vibrant and fertile imaginations in the world, I expect better than this of Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  I demand more.  He is capable of better.