I was wondering, after seeing this – Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest, zany effort – whether this is “another Jeunet”; whether it’s a film you attend knowing that it’s the latest Jeunet film, instead of watching it with no prior knowledge of the director at all. Unlike Amelie, which was a surprisingly cheerful sideways turn in Jeunet’s career and a film that not only marked the “second phase” of his career and swept up potentially hundreds of thousands of casual filmgoers, Micmacs a tire-larigot is Jeunet speaking to his diehard, “film buff” audience, one already primed to react to his films in a particular way and to not expect anything revolutionary or even different. When Amelie smashed its way into the marketplace in its effortlessly charming way, it became almost everyone’s default “foreign film” that they see every five years. People went out of their way to see it. Will that happen with Micmacs? It’s possible, but highly unlikely.

Still, this isn’t a problem in the slightest. To expect a massive upheaval only two films after Amelie would be disingenuous. Further down the track, if Jeunet’s still mixing up the same ingredients over and over, his fans may get bored, but I’m not even sure that’s likely either. Whereas someone like Tim Burton routinely gets shtick for honing in on his personal habits and churning out gothic-dark film after gothic-dark film, Jeunet is unlikely to receive the same treatment, and there’s a few reasons for that. The first is that, despite his debut Delicatessan coming out nearly twenty years ago now, Jeunet still feels like a fresh young talent, chiefly because his career has spanned fewer films, and also because when most people think of Amelie they’d think “Ah, that movie with Audrey Tatou being cute” rather than “Ah, that excellent Jeunet film.” Burton’s name is entrenched in his films; he’s more well-known nowadays than the films he makes, which is a bizarre achievement. The second is that Jeunet’s more immediately likable a person – like Tatou in Amelie, he’s prone to winking at the camera in a deliberately eccentric but at least charming way. Whereas Burton is more likely to put on his snazzy blue glasses and pose as if he’s been cast in a waxwork factory, all brood and darkness. And thus, we have our final reason; Burton’s put-upon goth persona is so wearying because there’s no self-awareness to it whatsoever. But Jeunet… Jeunet is fun. Jeunet is charming. His films, and this is the most important point of all, are funny.

Sometimes too funny. I’m fully aware that Tatou’s winking at camera alone annoyed many who saw Amelie, and Jeunet’s films are always overladen with in-your-face whackiness. Were this an American indie film, this’d be a turn-off, but Jeunet gets away with it. In fact, to hell with it; the French always get away with it, which is odd in itself because the stereotypical Frenchman sits around intellectualising rather than being strange and kooky. They’re also portrayed as bloodthirsty, and to be fair, just listen to their national anthem. But “charm” is also part of France’s stereotypical mandate, as paradoxical as that may seem, and Jeunet loves nothing more than revelling in what “France” is.

The Cannes jury rejected Amelie in 2001, and probably still hold a huge grudge against it for excelling overseas instead of, say, The Piano Teacher, another excellent but morose and gritty film. For a group of French film enthusiasts, a film portraying their country in a cartoony, ridiculous way, again, was just too much to bear. But it’s always hard to enjoy the absurdities of one’s international perception. I don’t think anyone who sees a Jeunet film seriously believes that France is as he represents it; everyone just wishes it was as he represents it. It’s an idealistic, strange world, one that plays to the rules of a cartoon but is filmed in live action. That’s why, even when Micmacs occasionally feels like it’s hoarding too heavily every possible joke and sight gag it can, it doesn’t truly matter because it’s a cartoon-with-real people. Its effortless charm combats any irritating facets the jokes may have taken on in a different context.

The strangest thing about its humour, then, is the sheer darkness of the world presented to us. Those who have seen Delicatessan will know Jeunet can have a penchant for dark humour mixed amongst his overt zaniness, but for those who started with Amelie (which, at its basest, makes a hilarious orgasm joke) and continued with A Very Long Engagement (which never portrays its wartime scenes as being humorous) will probably be shocked at the opening of Micmacs, where Bazil’s father steps on a landmine, Bazil’s family grieves, and then Bazil’s charming interactive viewing of Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep is cut short when he’s shot in the head by accident. As the film continues, Bazil learns that the perpetrators were two weapons dealers, and he vows to destroy their operations. So to get this straight; there’s weapons manufacture, there’s distinct Iraq references, and there’s even a moment where one of the villains (who doesn’t even look particularly villainous, and instead is simply a spiff bloke in a suit) apologies to women raped in wartime. Can Jeunet really do this? Can he really construct a world as cartoonish as this, then intersperse real-life concerns, and very serious concerns at that, and play them for laughs as well?

I’d say he can, and the tone shifts worked for me, but I know others who were very nonplussed by this. And that in itself is interesting. Delicatessan is well-known to be the “darkest” of Jeunet’s films, but its themes of cannibalism and kidnap are shoved into a futuristic dystopia that doesn’t correspond to the world as we know it. Micmacs is the first time that Jeunet’s allowed such darkness to seep into the world that we recognise as ours – even if we recognise that it’s not ours anyway, since it’s set in cartoon-France. It’s a strange and daring balance to seek, but Jeunet makes it work. Liam and I used to joke about Jeunet’s France and Gaspar Noe’s France being the exact same France, but the former is scenes from the daytime and the latter scenes from the underground at night – but if Micmacs is anything to go by, we might one day see a Jeunet who could quite happily team up with Noe at some point. The thought excites and scares me.

Despite all this, though, Micmacs is business as usual. It’s outright funnier than his last two films, it’s subtly darker than his last two films, but it looks the same (you may be surprised to learn that Jeunet’s usual director of photography didn’t work on this film – could you tell?), it speaks the same, and at the end of the day it makes you feel the same. It is nothing more or less than another great film from this master of the oddball.

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