Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s kinetically inventive shaggy dog tale impresses with its visual inventiveness and intricate story-telling.
As with his earlier films Delicatessen and Amelie, Jeunet is disinterested in traditional character and plot, instead weaving an impressionistic fable.
Bazil (Dany Boon from Bienvenue ches les Ch’tis), a young man, has his life destroyed when he is first orphaned and then wounded by munitions from two competing French arms manufacturers.
Unable to work thanks to his injuries, he is taken in by a strange (literal) underclass who live beneath a Parisian junkyard. Hearing Bazil’s sad tale they agree to aid him in his quest to avenge his father and bring down the greedy arms manufacturers.
In among the capers and the countless sight-gags Bazil even has time for a trademark Jeunet ‘beauty and the geek’ love affair. A relentlessly upbeat and headily accomplished film.