Micmacs is a 2009 French comedy film by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Its original French title is MicMacs à tire-larigot (loosely "Non-stop shenanigans"). The film is billed as a "satire on the world arms trade". It premiered on 15 September 2009 at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival as a gala screening at Roy Thomson Hall.
Plot
A young boy named Bazil loses his military father, who is blown up while attempting to defuse a land mine in the Western Sahara. Thirty years later, Bazil (Dany Boon) is working in a video rental shop in Paris when a stray bullet from a shoot-out in the street enters his forehead. Doctors save him but decide against removing the bullet, though it may kill him at any moment, for fear of damaging his brain further. Bazil returns to his workplace to find that he has been replaced. As he leaves, his replacement gives him a shell casing that she found from the bullet that had struck him.
Bazil, who has miming and sign language talents, becomes a homeless busker until he is taken in by a man named Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle) to Tire-Larigots, a shelter carved under a mountain of recycling material. Bazil is befriended by the other scavenging dwellers: Elastic Girl (Julie Ferrier), a contortionist, Mama Chow (Yolande Moreau), who feeds and mothers the crew, Remington (Omar Sy) a former ethnographer from Africa who speaks entirely in old-fashioned language clichés, Buster (Dominique Pinon), a former human cannonball, Tiny Pete (Michel Crémadès), an artist who designs moving sculptures from scavenged trash, and Calculator (Marie-Julie Baup), a young woman who measures and calculates things with a glance. Slammer himself is a former convict who miraculously survived an execution by guillotine.
While scavenging for trash, Bazil discovers the offices and factories of the firms that manufactured the landmine that orphaned him and the bullet he was shot with, on opposite sides of a street. He enters the latter to ask for compensation but is thrown out violently on orders of CEO Nicolas Thibault de Fenouillet. He then infiltrates the other company and manages to hear a speech by its CEO, François Marconi.
Bazil follows Marconi home and hangs a microphone down his chimney. He hears a phone conversation arranging a meeting between Marconi and associates of Omar Boulounga, an African dictator seeking arms for an upcoming violent conflict. Mama Chow demands to know what Bazil is up to and the crew decides to help him exact revenge on the two arms dealers. They first incapacitate Boulounga's men by planting drugs on them in an airport.
Remington, claiming to be Boulounga's right-hand man, meets with De Fenouillet and proposes the same deal which was offered to Marconi. Later, Remington calls each of Marconi and De Fennouillet and angrily cancels the deal. He tells Marconi that he will be dealing with De Fennouillet, and tells De Fennouillet that he will be dealing with Marconi. The two CEOs are furious and declare war on each other. Bazil and his friends break into Marconi's house and steal and replace his luxury cars, and steal De Fenouillet's collection of body-part relics from historical persons. They also steal and destroy a truck full of bombs from Marconi's plant. Marconi assumes that De Fennouillet is responsible, and arranges to sabotage a machine causing a massive explosion in De Fennouillet's factory. Next, Elastic Girl breaks into Marconi's apartment searching for blackmail material while Bazil waits and listens on the roof.