Micmacs (MA). Running time: 105 minutes. Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Starring: Danny Boon, André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié, Julie Ferrier, Dominique Pinon, Michel Crémadès, Marie-Julie Baup
In her 2008 book Superheroes: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films, British cultural commentator Roz Kaveney argues a case for the 'liminality' of superheroes. Superheroes, she writes, 'are uncanny and exist at the threshold between states — it is the threshold that is important rather than the states it lies between'.
Superheroes, she continues, can be 'socially dead, though alive, through the loss of their original family', 'exist as figures of the twilight', or take on 'the nature of alchemical elements, while remaining essentially human'. Some are 'morally liminal, good and evil at once'; most are vigilantes, working outside, although ostensibly on the same side as, the law.
Micmacs is the new film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the visionary French director of Delicatessen (1991) and Amelie (2001). It shares the fantastical whimsy, demented humour and serious subtext that are the trademarks of those idiosyncratic classics. But it is also helpful, if not entirely accurate, to think of Micmacs as a superhero film. That's especially true when armed with Kaveney's concept of 'liminality'.
Its protagonist, Bazil (Boon), lost his parents at a young age. His soldier father was killed by a landmine during a routine military operation. His mother's subsequent mental breakdown and institutionalisation meant Bazil was effectively orphaned. Orphanhood is a superhero trope — think of Batman and Superman, for starters.
As an adult, Bazil is afflicted by a further crisis: he is accidentally shot in the head during a drive-by shooting. The bullet lodges in his brain but doesn't kill him. By the flip of a coin, the surgeon on duty opts not to operate and so to risk causing devastating brain damage. Instead he leaves the bullet where it is, although with the proviso that Bazil could still drop dead at any moment. That said, he is lucky to be alive at all.
This is the kind of extraordinary, traumatic event that in superhero lore takes a 'normal' person to another plane. It's Spider-Man's radioactive spider bite, or the technological crises that afflict and transform the Hulk and the Fantastic Four. Bazil loses his job and his home and takes to the street. His ever-imminent death gives him a new outlook on life. In appearance a vagrant, really he's just living freely, knowing each day could be his last.
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