Amelie was an instant hit, and it remains the highest grossing French film to date. Although some dismissed it as a crowd-pleaser, the film’s success lies precisely in taking the clichéd, boy-meets-girl (or in this case girl-meets-boy) story, and removing the banality from it. What resulted was a deeply human, touching film devoid of cheap sentimentality and easy drama. Still, Amelie marked the split between Jeunet and Caro. “I knew that it would’ve been impossible to do Amelie with Marc Caro. Romance is not his cup of tea. Emotion or human beings, Caro is not interested in that.”
     Micmacs, opening in the US on May 28, tackles a very different theme. Its hero, Bazil, a lovable eccentric, takes on the big bad weapon’s manufacturers after his father gets blown up by a field mine, and he himself is hit with a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. But don’t go looking for a moralizing, war-is-bad, post-Iraq tale. Jeunet is not out to preach. What he finds fascinating is the absurdity of the war industry. “I was more interested in the people who invent things that kill and bring suffering, but who are actually very nice in real life,” Jeunet says. “I met them when we were doing research for Micmacs. Like workers in any other field, they just want to do their job better. The difference, of course, is that they are making better killing machines. But when you tell them that they make things that kill people, they say, ‘We don’t work for the Ministry of Offense, we work for the Ministry of Defense’. And they always sell the weapons to the good guys, never to the bad guys. We visited a manufacturer in Belgium and they were showing us the new rocket that hits the tank, but the tank does not explode. Instead it heats up and burns everyone inside. And they say, ‘If we don’t do that, the Americans are going to do that anyway’. In fact they worked for an American company. I thought it was interesting to speak of it, but of course I made a caricature. I thought about whether to make a serious film out of it, but I already started with comedy in mind.”
     Indeed, the funniest moment in the film is the absurd speech by an arms manufacturer in which he compares his work to Rimbaud’s poetry. The same evening he proudly recounts the speech to his son, to which the kid replies, “If you want to look like Rambo, you need to work out more.” According to Jeunet, what’s strange is that “they laugh more at that joke in the US”. Surprised, I asked how many Americans he thinks know Rimbaud. “Maybe not Rimbaud, but Rambo they know. By the way, I saw the last Rambo on TV the other day, and I thought it was really well done. Violent and stupid, of course, but very well done.”
     After the surgery Bazil is adopted by a crew of outsiders that are even weirder than he is. Jeunet loves using oddballs in his films. In essence, his characters are characters. He says, “All my characters are misfits. It’s more emotional to have people with a handicap. Even Amelie, she is so shy, she has to really over come it to pursue her love. In Micmacs, the guy has a bullet in his head that could kill him at any time. And the other misfits live in a metal cavern. They all have one dominant trait. They are like the Snow White and the seven dwarves.”
     As usual, Jeunet’s attention to detail is astounding. Like a painter, he obsesses about every brush stroke. (Surely, there is a bit of Jeunet in the brittle man in Amelie who obsessively paints the same work by Renoir over and over again). Actually, in Jeunet’s work the minute details work hand in hand with the major themes.