MICMACS directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant, with Dany Boon, André Dussolier, Nicolas Marié, Yolande Moreau, Marie-Julie Baup and Dominique Pinon. An E1 Entertainment release. 105 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (May 28). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet didn’t intend to cast Dany Boon as a 21st-century Charlie Chaplin. He just noticed his star was standing a certain way.[breifbreak][rssbreak]
“I saw Chaplin,” Jeunet says, “and I told him so.”
“It was a good direction,” Boon agrees.
“You have an attitude exactly like that,” Jeunet says. “It’s exactly a Chaplin attitude.”
This isn’t to say that Boon is playing Chaplin in Jeunet’s new film, the giddy comedy Micmacs. It’s more that Boon’s performance – a quasi-homeless scrounger out to take down some scornful, well-heeled captains of industry – blends sympathy and cunning in much the same way as cinema’s most famous tramp. That, plus the posture, led Jeunet to make the connection.
We could talk more about this, but there’s a small problem: the room is vibrating, thanks to several crews of hard-hatted men busily jackhammering something that doesn’t want to be jackhammered outside the window of the interview suite. There’s nowhere else to go – the hotel is booked solid for TIFF – so the three of us soldier on as though this were perfectly normal, struggling through our conversation with the help of an interpreter.
The grinding gets louder. We wait it out for a moment, then shift our conversation to the vivid imagery of Micmacs, which declares itself as un film de Jeunet in its first frames.
“I change my DPs,” Jeunet says, “from Darius Khondji to Bruno Delbonnel, and this time it’s a new one, Tetsuo Nagata. But there’s a continuity of colour and stuff because I know exactly what I want.”
He’s not kidding. Jeunet’s visual sensibility is as distinctive as it is striking – as Boon is quick to attest.
“What I loved to do when I was coming on the set,” the actor says, “was just to take a look in the camera, because I was wondering, ‘What are we doing here?’ And I looked in the camera: ‘Oh shit, that’s great!’ I’d never seen Paris that way.”
“But it’s not just a look,” Jeunet says. “I’d go during the weekend with my video camera to look for the best angles, and I spent a lot of time to find the right picture, the right scene. Five hundred pictures to take one shot.”
As exacting as his compositions may be, Jeunet’s even more obsessive about tweaking the image after the fact. Amélie was one of the first films to be digitally overhauled in post-production, from subtle shifts in the colour timing to the size of Tautou’s eyes, which were sometimes enlarged for subliminal effect. He spent seven weeks on the timing of Micmacs, and there’s something endearing about his perfectionist approach to a movie set in such a ramshackle world.
“The smallest detail, I chose everything,” Jeunet says, and it’s not arrogance but pride. “There was nobody to tell me no.”
normw@nowtoronto.com
