Typically, French writer/director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known Stateside for AMÉLIE/’01 and DELICATESSEN/’91, demonstrates a bad case of the cutes along with a weakness for excessively ornate design that makes someone as OTT as Baz Luhrmann look more severe than Mies van der Rohe. Cinematic vices that allow even his most popular successes to quickly exhaust themselves and his audiences.* At least this fabulist caper, an eccentrics’ tale of revenge against rival titans of industrial war weapons, comes with a literary background as it’s straight out of Jean Giraudoux’s equally twee THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-madwoman-of-chaillot-1969.html), though missing Giraudoux’s farcical boulevard grandeur. Jeunet opens with farcical tragedy² as a land mine kills a father before thirty years pass and his son takes a bullet in the head. (Collateral damage from a terrorist incident.) But the son recovers to seek revenge against that pair of international arms dealers, helped by some ‘Court of Miracles’ eccentrics who design a plan of action worthy of Rube Goldberg.* You have been warned.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *From our limited Jeunet list, A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT/’04 shows him at his most digestible. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/very-long-engagement-2004.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The shame of it all is that Jeunet shows real technical chops at almost everything he tries. Maybe someone could get him and, say, Terry Gilliam enrolled at some lion taming school . . . as beasts who need taming.
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