Thoughtful film criticism
Science Fantasy Today: On Micmacs à tire-larigot (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 2009) and The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus (Terry Gilliam, France/Canada/UK, 2009)
After having seen Marc Caro's first solo film, Dante 01 (France, 2008), and having seen Jeunet's solo work, in particular Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amélie (France/Germany, 2001), I wondered in a brief article on the former whether Caro does the darker stuff better than Jeunet, who does the light stuff, a view seemingly seconded by those who have written about Jeunet and his most famous film in particular.
However, in Micmacs à tire-larigot (to be released in the UK as Micmacs from what I can gather, but which perhaps translates as 'The Non-Stop Shadiness Shop' - even though I coin this rough and ready translation myself), there is an element of darkness that seems closest to the pair's collaborative films, Delicatessen (France, 1991) and La Cité des Enfants perdus/City of Lost Children (France/Germany/Spain, 1995).
This is mainly in the lighting and mise-en-scène (and it may also be because I seemed more or less instantly to forget Jeunet's last film, Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (France/USA, 2004)); Micmacs features in particular a shady base for misfits under a rubbish heap as well as angular and imposing buildings. What is more, Micmacs' predilection for mechanical constructions, most notably in the machines made by inventor Petit Pierre (Michel Crémadès), also seems to recall City of Lost Children.
I have to admit to not really being a massive fan of those earlier Jeunet/Caro films. My enthusiasm would peak at saying that I quite like them. I also probably have to admit to being a sucker for Amélie, about which I hope to have an article coming out in this journal. Basically it is because of Amélie that I would go to see a Jeunet film, that and the fact that I am, for research purposes, interested in the different uses of digital special effects in the French - as opposed to the American - context.
Amélie I liked for a number of reasons that are not on display in Micmacs. The main one of these is that, in spite of the fact that Amélie features a heroine whose heart we can see beating in her own chest, even though it features talking photographs, and pig-shaped lampshades that turn off their own lights, it seemed grounded in reality.
Don't get me wrong: I am all too aware of the outcry that surrounded the film on account of the whitewashing that it did to Montmartre, removing from the place not just graffiti and dogshit, but also ethnic diversity, not least from the Pigalle, which exists just down the hill.
But at the end of the day, however much a picture postcard of Abbesses and surrounding area, Amélie somewhere along the line had some relation or connection to the real world, even if it flaunted this connection heavily, perhaps even irresponsibly.
It is not that lampshades have autonomy in the real world (as far as we know), but the film did have a logical consistency. It also featured obstacles to overcome: Amélie had to work through the space of Montmartre to get Nino; she showed fear and confusion; her conversations with the Man of Glass and the videotape of the horse running the Tour de France, helped us to wonder that this magic might well be there in the real world around us. Amélie and Nino had real and fairly shitty jobs. Amélie had an estranged father. Just things that made her rounded and real.
Micmacs, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the real world - and while it is enjoyable enough, it just does not set my world on fire. I quite like it, which is to damn it with faint praise. Why do I not like it? And why has it nothing to do with the real world? Well, while I might perhaps normally love a film for subverting our typical notions of physics, space and time, the problem is that Micmacs is a fantasy world that sits in isolation; it is not alongside, or a bastard version of, or in part related to the real world beyond having human figures in it, some of whom (Dany Boon, André Dussollier, Yolande Moreau, Dominique Pinon, etc) we may recognise from other films. Other than this, the film makes its own rules up as it goes along, and this leads one/me to feel disappointed, because one has no sense of obstacles overcome. One has no sense that any of the characters must work for anything.
Dany Boon plays Bazil, a man whose father was killed by a landmine and who also might die at any moment because of a bullet lodged in his head during a getaway not connected to him at all. Losing his job after too much time on the mend, Bazil busks as a robotic dancer before becoming part of the afore-mentioned garbage-living community of eccentrics. Here he hatches a plan to avenge himself against the two arms companies that ruined his life, and which conveniently have offices opposite each other.
Cue a sort-of revenge fantasy, in which Bazil and company make the two arms manufacturers compete over contracts for the would-be dictator of an unnamed African country, a plan that just goes immensely smoothly at all points, and never ever does one wonder that any real damage or violence might be done to anyone, even though we are dealing with companies that trade, supposedly, in real weapons.
When there may be an obstacle, Bazil's friends turn up with a giant magnet, keys to a drawbridge, and various other unlikely devices to save him. Perhaps Jeunet even mocks cinematic conventions by having a short scene in which the gang decides on whether to help Bazil: no argument, no pros and cons - no need. Everyone raises their hand. On the film goes.
In other words, as in a cartoon - Jeunet's debt to which is made clear early on in the film when a Tex Avery or some such is playing in the video store from which Bazil gets fired - the heroes can just do anything. The rules are off. Anything goes. And what they do may have ingenuity and cuteness, but how about they fail a few times first?
For a film that is supposedly a rant against weapons manufacturers, this film could sorely - surely - do with showing us the very real cost that landmines and the like can have against humans? We do - shockingly - see Bazil's father get killed and Bazil get shot; but after this point the film becomes a mere fantasy in which Bazil is more or less undefeatable and his burgeoning romance for contortionist Caoutchouc (Julie Ferrier) is simply him deciding to accept her advances, not him trying to win her in any way (maybe a 'neat' gender reversal from usual films, but too neat if neat at all).
Perhaps the film is, then, a disturbing fantasy of Bazil's, which, in its very freedom of action - in that anything does go - highlights how in the 'real world' we can do little to prevent the arms trade. But this brand of cynicism or nihilism is not one I want to agree with: I'd rather not just sit around and dream of ending the arms trade because I know I can't in fact end it, but I'd rather - for want of a better word - fight fight fight against it until my last breath is drawn. But maybe Jeunet's film inspires us to do that because it is, on this level, so angry-making. But I feel more angry with the film than with the arms trade, so I'm not sure that this is Jeunet's intention or a beneficial response to have.
Politically, the film is also on odd ground. So Jeunet can just invent an African dictatorship that needs arms and no one raises an eyelid. Furthermore, the end of the film features the two arms dealers (André Dussollier and Nicolas Marié) believing that they are held captive by vengeful Middle Eastern 'extremists' who want them to apologise for the deaths of their children through landmine explosions. They end up making a confession that is then seen to have been recorded and which proliferates via YouTube around the webosphere, leading to their resignation (but not to the end of their businesses, for the people who run the factories are not the factories themselves).
In fact, it is Bazil and gang in disguise as the families of Middle Eastern mine victims. And here I felt most angry: so Bazil has lost his father to mines, but the appropriation by French characters of the victim status that is not really theirs, using photos of mine victims to cement their case... Well, this really made me quite angry - again with the film - for there are real mine victims in the world. And I did succumb to feeling that the film was irresponsible in its treatment of the arms trade, as well as for its racial politics.
Bazil - and other characters - spend a lot of time miming. Bazil mimes conversations from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, USA, 1946) at the start of the film, together with various other monologues delivered throughout the film, although he is not the only character to do so. Furthermore, he and some kids and Caoutchouc spend their time 'talking' in a kind of click sign language. Is it no one has anything to say for themselves in this world? Or is it that Bazil is a puppetmaster, doing what he wants as and when he wants and controlling the other as avatars of himself as and when he sees fit? Perhaps also it is that verbal/linguistic communication is redundant and the physical 'language' of cinema is a 'superior' form. I'm not sure what the answer is, but the film suggests a breakdown in (verbal) communication somewhere along the line. Micmacs as a mime of the real world? Maybe, but I am still hesitant about the film's 'nihilism' if communication is indeed deemed possible because we are only ever quoting the words of others. I certainly did not feel as though Micmacs was expressing my thoughts... But again, maybe Jeunet is too clever, an agent provocateur of the cinema trying to make me angry at the 'real' world (but really making me angry at his film)...
And finally, while the film has some charm and is canny of the proliferation of film and video in the world (Bazil in a video store; Bazil taping the arms dealer's confession to upload to YouTube; CCTV cameras everywhere; Bazil often driving past posters for his own film, Micmacs à tire-larigot - as if the whole movie were simply his fantasy of starring in a film, perhaps his visions on his deathbed), it is odd that this is a film that seemingly delights in the mechanical. Amélie may be groundbreaking for its CGI, and while there is a lot of CGI here, the film also seems to delight in machines made from scrap that perform beautiful little tricks and dances that have no genuine use-value, something that makes them useless and perhaps art, therefore.
My query regarding this matter is this: if Micmacs seems to desire the retention of real machines in the contemporary world (and ones that are creative, rather than destructive - as in the weapons made by the two companies), this would suggest that the loss of reality that we might typically associate precisely with CGI is somehow deemed bad. And yet I opened my blog on Micmacs by trying to explain how, paradoxically, Amélie, which uses so many special effects, has more footing in the real world than does Micmacs, which professes such nostalgia for physical, tangible machines, and yet which feels utterly disconnected from the real world, despite having a real world problems (arms trade) as its key concern.
This seems a strange contradiction but one that I cannot resolve here, even though the same issue seems to be at the heart of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus - to be discussed below. But in a world where anything can happen, since it has no connection to the real world, then it is hard for us to care about the characters. They suffer no pain, they face no obstacles to their goals bar opportunities to prove themselves ever more ingenious. In this cartoon world, bereft of any emotional involvement (fear that they might suffer), we quickly lose interest... Which is sad, because Micmacs is, like other Jeunet and Jeunet and Caro films, beautiful to behold, promising the (white bourgeois boy's) charm of Amélie, but never delivering. Does Jeunet do this on purpose? And if so, why?
Like Jeunet, my thoughts on Terry Gilliam have always been that he is 'okay' as a director; he presents interesting fantasy worlds, but since there are no rules, again I find them hard to connect with, subjected as I am to the 'genius' of Terry Gillam's sometimes impressive imagination, but in a world that seems to forego all human connection with its audience.
And yet where Jeunet seems not to have delivered a film that can connect to the real world, Gilliam may well have done just the opposite, making of his film a movie that really is among his best.
Why is Gilliam's film connected to the real world? Well, because there is suffering and pain in his film, not least through the character of Anton (Andrew Garfield, star of the future and of Boy A (John Crowley, UK, 2007)), whose story this film seems to tell as much as any others.
Anton is in love with Scrumpy (supermodel Lily Cole), who seems immediately to be taken with seeming amnesia victim and charity chancer Tony (Heath Ledger, but also Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell). Scrumpy is about to turn 16, at which point she will become the property of the Devil (Tom Waits), who will win her on account of a bet he won against Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) some years back. However, the Devil makes a new bet with Parnassus: the first to win five souls can 'have' (or set free, depending on your point of view) Scrumpy.
Parnassus 'wins' souls by having them enter his Imaginarium, a kind of fantasy space in which visitors see their deepest desires visualised (in digital form), but in which also they will face temptation away from achievement and into sloth, debauchery and the like. Once they have entered Mr Nick/the Devil's tempting spaces, the Devil 'wins' them and they do not leave the Imaginarium, but, presumably, are dead. While if they choose not to enter the Devil's haunts but to leave the Imaginarium and return as if reborn to the world, then Parnassus 'wins.'
The Imaginarium is fronted by a seemingly faded roadside theatre mounted on a horse-drawn omnibus of sorts, upon which Parnassus, Scrumpy, Anton and dwarf Percy (Verne Troyer) perform - but without much success. Step forward mysterious would-be murder victim Tony, whom they find hanging à la Roberto Calvi from a London bridge, but who is still alive thanks to a flute he has placed in his throat as a windpipe.
Tony seems to use his sex appeal to revive the fortunes of the travelling players, and Parnassus quickly 'wins' 4 souls, before the Devil gets back in the game by bringing in some Russian mafiosi who in fact are the ones who tried to kill Tony who had stolen their money in his bid to set up a charity for children - a charity that, it seems, is really a way for Tony to make money out of poor children who just get poorer.
Ledger is good in the film, although his accent veers oddly between English and Australian, while the rest of the cast are okay (Plummer, Waits), or occasionally flat (Cole). But it is Garfield who, for me, steals the show, from his manic mobility early on to his playful cross-dressing later on. In part it is his - and the other performances - which are happy to work with realistic dialogue (mumbling, swearing, etc) in order to ground this fantasy film in reality.
In part it is also Gilliam's stock use of odd camera angles, either from just below waist height or above head height - but rarely at the conventional shoulder height - that lends to the film, perhaps in spite of intentions, a sense of the real, because the variations in angles (from below, from above, rarely from 'straight on') gives us a sense of the characters' struggle to be seen and heard in the world.
And in particular it is the mise-en-scène of the film that makes it feel real and alive. Less so in the Imaginarium or flashback sequences (although Gilliam's depiction of a Buddhist temple of sorts is impressive in scale, even if at other times he is derivative of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth). Rather, it is the theatre trying to operate by Tower Bridge, in one of London's shopping arcades, etc, that makes of the film something rooted in a tangible and recognisable reality. No one watches the theatre with its old-fangled tricks, as kids prefer instead to go on merry-go-rounds and play on their PSPs. This is no documentary, but the fact that the cast has to struggle against their environement, and that sometimes they must even work hard just to be seen given (Gilliam's predilection for night time scenes when out and about in London), makes it a film to which one can connect with far greater ease than with Jeunet's film.
Jeunet's film is childish: it makes up its own rules and it even resorts on occasion to nob gags (when it is not self-consciously trying to have 'Amélie' appeal), and it alienates (me) as a result. Gilliam's, on the other hand, does offer a childish perspective on the world, made most clear when Anton emerges to scupper Tony's evil plans in the form of a child, but it is a world in which children get exploited and smacked, where the threat of child abduction looms (an irate parent thinking the paedo theatre performers have nicked his kid), where drunkards can emerge from anywhere and threaten the safety of the film world at any moment. It is an adult consideration of being a child, or how an adult reconciles the desire to be childish in a threatening world. In Micmacs, there is an identified and not very threatening pair of villains, but no random threats. In other words, what I hated most about Gilliam's working methods as exposed in the afore-mentioned Fulton and Pepe's Lost in La Mancha (UK/USA, 2002) is in fact what perhaps makes Parnassus the superior of these two films (in my eyes): its chaos.
Trouble can and does come from anywhere, and the lack of control over the actors, their seemingly freefalling delivery, the descent into a place that might have rules but which we do not know is more interesting that Jeunet's films where there are no rules, and we know this from too early on (the characters do not even seem to need to learn this).
Bazil in Micmacs pretends to be a robot when busking for money. Like Parnassus, Micmacs is also concerned with the mechanising effects of the contemporary world. Furthermore, both films share a nostalgia for the lo-fi and genuine effect - a skirt dancing on a hanger, a bunch of flowers pulled from sleeve - even though both films also have digital wizardry going on up to the hilt. But where in Jeunet's film - a film about arms dealers! - no one is ever in any danger. In Gilliam's film, the world's got teeth and shit can happen at any time.
Perhaps the death of Heath Ledger during shooting changed the fabric of Parnassus in such a way that we are all too aware of this (and thus it is knowledge about the film as much as the film itself that helps to give this impression). Gambling on Heath Ledger's soul is not a wager worth taking to make a great film. By which I mean to say that the it is not a good thing that Ledger died in order for Gilliam to make an interesting film. But it is a fitting tribute to Ledger, if tribute can here be an appropriate term, that Gilliam's film does, unlike Jeunet's, remain rooted in a difficult and therefore more real world in which fantasy should only serve as an avenue to death or rebirth, not as an avenue as escape from or denial of the chaos that surrounds us all.
However, in Micmacs à tire-larigot (to be released in the UK as Micmacs from what I can gather, but which perhaps translates as 'The Non-Stop Shadiness Shop' - even though I coin this rough and ready translation myself), there is an element of darkness that seems closest to the pair's collaborative films, Delicatessen (France, 1991) and La Cité des Enfants perdus/City of Lost Children (France/Germany/Spain, 1995).
This is mainly in the lighting and mise-en-scène (and it may also be because I seemed more or less instantly to forget Jeunet's last film, Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (France/USA, 2004)); Micmacs features in particular a shady base for misfits under a rubbish heap as well as angular and imposing buildings. What is more, Micmacs' predilection for mechanical constructions, most notably in the machines made by inventor Petit Pierre (Michel Crémadès), also seems to recall City of Lost Children.
I have to admit to not really being a massive fan of those earlier Jeunet/Caro films. My enthusiasm would peak at saying that I quite like them. I also probably have to admit to being a sucker for Amélie, about which I hope to have an article coming out in this journal. Basically it is because of Amélie that I would go to see a Jeunet film, that and the fact that I am, for research purposes, interested in the different uses of digital special effects in the French - as opposed to the American - context.
Amélie I liked for a number of reasons that are not on display in Micmacs. The main one of these is that, in spite of the fact that Amélie features a heroine whose heart we can see beating in her own chest, even though it features talking photographs, and pig-shaped lampshades that turn off their own lights, it seemed grounded in reality.
Don't get me wrong: I am all too aware of the outcry that surrounded the film on account of the whitewashing that it did to Montmartre, removing from the place not just graffiti and dogshit, but also ethnic diversity, not least from the Pigalle, which exists just down the hill.
But at the end of the day, however much a picture postcard of Abbesses and surrounding area, Amélie somewhere along the line had some relation or connection to the real world, even if it flaunted this connection heavily, perhaps even irresponsibly.
It is not that lampshades have autonomy in the real world (as far as we know), but the film did have a logical consistency. It also featured obstacles to overcome: Amélie had to work through the space of Montmartre to get Nino; she showed fear and confusion; her conversations with the Man of Glass and the videotape of the horse running the Tour de France, helped us to wonder that this magic might well be there in the real world around us. Amélie and Nino had real and fairly shitty jobs. Amélie had an estranged father. Just things that made her rounded and real.
Micmacs, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the real world - and while it is enjoyable enough, it just does not set my world on fire. I quite like it, which is to damn it with faint praise. Why do I not like it? And why has it nothing to do with the real world? Well, while I might perhaps normally love a film for subverting our typical notions of physics, space and time, the problem is that Micmacs is a fantasy world that sits in isolation; it is not alongside, or a bastard version of, or in part related to the real world beyond having human figures in it, some of whom (Dany Boon, André Dussollier, Yolande Moreau, Dominique Pinon, etc) we may recognise from other films. Other than this, the film makes its own rules up as it goes along, and this leads one/me to feel disappointed, because one has no sense of obstacles overcome. One has no sense that any of the characters must work for anything.
Dany Boon plays Bazil, a man whose father was killed by a landmine and who also might die at any moment because of a bullet lodged in his head during a getaway not connected to him at all. Losing his job after too much time on the mend, Bazil busks as a robotic dancer before becoming part of the afore-mentioned garbage-living community of eccentrics. Here he hatches a plan to avenge himself against the two arms companies that ruined his life, and which conveniently have offices opposite each other.
Cue a sort-of revenge fantasy, in which Bazil and company make the two arms manufacturers compete over contracts for the would-be dictator of an unnamed African country, a plan that just goes immensely smoothly at all points, and never ever does one wonder that any real damage or violence might be done to anyone, even though we are dealing with companies that trade, supposedly, in real weapons.
When there may be an obstacle, Bazil's friends turn up with a giant magnet, keys to a drawbridge, and various other unlikely devices to save him. Perhaps Jeunet even mocks cinematic conventions by having a short scene in which the gang decides on whether to help Bazil: no argument, no pros and cons - no need. Everyone raises their hand. On the film goes.
In other words, as in a cartoon - Jeunet's debt to which is made clear early on in the film when a Tex Avery or some such is playing in the video store from which Bazil gets fired - the heroes can just do anything. The rules are off. Anything goes. And what they do may have ingenuity and cuteness, but how about they fail a few times first?
For a film that is supposedly a rant against weapons manufacturers, this film could sorely - surely - do with showing us the very real cost that landmines and the like can have against humans? We do - shockingly - see Bazil's father get killed and Bazil get shot; but after this point the film becomes a mere fantasy in which Bazil is more or less undefeatable and his burgeoning romance for contortionist Caoutchouc (Julie Ferrier) is simply him deciding to accept her advances, not him trying to win her in any way (maybe a 'neat' gender reversal from usual films, but too neat if neat at all).
Perhaps the film is, then, a disturbing fantasy of Bazil's, which, in its very freedom of action - in that anything does go - highlights how in the 'real world' we can do little to prevent the arms trade. But this brand of cynicism or nihilism is not one I want to agree with: I'd rather not just sit around and dream of ending the arms trade because I know I can't in fact end it, but I'd rather - for want of a better word - fight fight fight against it until my last breath is drawn. But maybe Jeunet's film inspires us to do that because it is, on this level, so angry-making. But I feel more angry with the film than with the arms trade, so I'm not sure that this is Jeunet's intention or a beneficial response to have.
Politically, the film is also on odd ground. So Jeunet can just invent an African dictatorship that needs arms and no one raises an eyelid. Furthermore, the end of the film features the two arms dealers (André Dussollier and Nicolas Marié) believing that they are held captive by vengeful Middle Eastern 'extremists' who want them to apologise for the deaths of their children through landmine explosions. They end up making a confession that is then seen to have been recorded and which proliferates via YouTube around the webosphere, leading to their resignation (but not to the end of their businesses, for the people who run the factories are not the factories themselves).
In fact, it is Bazil and gang in disguise as the families of Middle Eastern mine victims. And here I felt most angry: so Bazil has lost his father to mines, but the appropriation by French characters of the victim status that is not really theirs, using photos of mine victims to cement their case... Well, this really made me quite angry - again with the film - for there are real mine victims in the world. And I did succumb to feeling that the film was irresponsible in its treatment of the arms trade, as well as for its racial politics.
Bazil - and other characters - spend a lot of time miming. Bazil mimes conversations from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, USA, 1946) at the start of the film, together with various other monologues delivered throughout the film, although he is not the only character to do so. Furthermore, he and some kids and Caoutchouc spend their time 'talking' in a kind of click sign language. Is it no one has anything to say for themselves in this world? Or is it that Bazil is a puppetmaster, doing what he wants as and when he wants and controlling the other as avatars of himself as and when he sees fit? Perhaps also it is that verbal/linguistic communication is redundant and the physical 'language' of cinema is a 'superior' form. I'm not sure what the answer is, but the film suggests a breakdown in (verbal) communication somewhere along the line. Micmacs as a mime of the real world? Maybe, but I am still hesitant about the film's 'nihilism' if communication is indeed deemed possible because we are only ever quoting the words of others. I certainly did not feel as though Micmacs was expressing my thoughts... But again, maybe Jeunet is too clever, an agent provocateur of the cinema trying to make me angry at the 'real' world (but really making me angry at his film)...
And finally, while the film has some charm and is canny of the proliferation of film and video in the world (Bazil in a video store; Bazil taping the arms dealer's confession to upload to YouTube; CCTV cameras everywhere; Bazil often driving past posters for his own film, Micmacs à tire-larigot - as if the whole movie were simply his fantasy of starring in a film, perhaps his visions on his deathbed), it is odd that this is a film that seemingly delights in the mechanical. Amélie may be groundbreaking for its CGI, and while there is a lot of CGI here, the film also seems to delight in machines made from scrap that perform beautiful little tricks and dances that have no genuine use-value, something that makes them useless and perhaps art, therefore.
My query regarding this matter is this: if Micmacs seems to desire the retention of real machines in the contemporary world (and ones that are creative, rather than destructive - as in the weapons made by the two companies), this would suggest that the loss of reality that we might typically associate precisely with CGI is somehow deemed bad. And yet I opened my blog on Micmacs by trying to explain how, paradoxically, Amélie, which uses so many special effects, has more footing in the real world than does Micmacs, which professes such nostalgia for physical, tangible machines, and yet which feels utterly disconnected from the real world, despite having a real world problems (arms trade) as its key concern.
This seems a strange contradiction but one that I cannot resolve here, even though the same issue seems to be at the heart of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus - to be discussed below. But in a world where anything can happen, since it has no connection to the real world, then it is hard for us to care about the characters. They suffer no pain, they face no obstacles to their goals bar opportunities to prove themselves ever more ingenious. In this cartoon world, bereft of any emotional involvement (fear that they might suffer), we quickly lose interest... Which is sad, because Micmacs is, like other Jeunet and Jeunet and Caro films, beautiful to behold, promising the (white bourgeois boy's) charm of Amélie, but never delivering. Does Jeunet do this on purpose? And if so, why?
Like Jeunet, my thoughts on Terry Gilliam have always been that he is 'okay' as a director; he presents interesting fantasy worlds, but since there are no rules, again I find them hard to connect with, subjected as I am to the 'genius' of Terry Gillam's sometimes impressive imagination, but in a world that seems to forego all human connection with its audience.
And yet where Jeunet seems not to have delivered a film that can connect to the real world, Gilliam may well have done just the opposite, making of his film a movie that really is among his best.
Why is Gilliam's film connected to the real world? Well, because there is suffering and pain in his film, not least through the character of Anton (Andrew Garfield, star of the future and of Boy A (John Crowley, UK, 2007)), whose story this film seems to tell as much as any others.
Anton is in love with Scrumpy (supermodel Lily Cole), who seems immediately to be taken with seeming amnesia victim and charity chancer Tony (Heath Ledger, but also Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell). Scrumpy is about to turn 16, at which point she will become the property of the Devil (Tom Waits), who will win her on account of a bet he won against Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) some years back. However, the Devil makes a new bet with Parnassus: the first to win five souls can 'have' (or set free, depending on your point of view) Scrumpy.
Parnassus 'wins' souls by having them enter his Imaginarium, a kind of fantasy space in which visitors see their deepest desires visualised (in digital form), but in which also they will face temptation away from achievement and into sloth, debauchery and the like. Once they have entered Mr Nick/the Devil's tempting spaces, the Devil 'wins' them and they do not leave the Imaginarium, but, presumably, are dead. While if they choose not to enter the Devil's haunts but to leave the Imaginarium and return as if reborn to the world, then Parnassus 'wins.'
The Imaginarium is fronted by a seemingly faded roadside theatre mounted on a horse-drawn omnibus of sorts, upon which Parnassus, Scrumpy, Anton and dwarf Percy (Verne Troyer) perform - but without much success. Step forward mysterious would-be murder victim Tony, whom they find hanging à la Roberto Calvi from a London bridge, but who is still alive thanks to a flute he has placed in his throat as a windpipe.
Tony seems to use his sex appeal to revive the fortunes of the travelling players, and Parnassus quickly 'wins' 4 souls, before the Devil gets back in the game by bringing in some Russian mafiosi who in fact are the ones who tried to kill Tony who had stolen their money in his bid to set up a charity for children - a charity that, it seems, is really a way for Tony to make money out of poor children who just get poorer.
Ledger is good in the film, although his accent veers oddly between English and Australian, while the rest of the cast are okay (Plummer, Waits), or occasionally flat (Cole). But it is Garfield who, for me, steals the show, from his manic mobility early on to his playful cross-dressing later on. In part it is his - and the other performances - which are happy to work with realistic dialogue (mumbling, swearing, etc) in order to ground this fantasy film in reality.
In part it is also Gilliam's stock use of odd camera angles, either from just below waist height or above head height - but rarely at the conventional shoulder height - that lends to the film, perhaps in spite of intentions, a sense of the real, because the variations in angles (from below, from above, rarely from 'straight on') gives us a sense of the characters' struggle to be seen and heard in the world.
And in particular it is the mise-en-scène of the film that makes it feel real and alive. Less so in the Imaginarium or flashback sequences (although Gilliam's depiction of a Buddhist temple of sorts is impressive in scale, even if at other times he is derivative of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth). Rather, it is the theatre trying to operate by Tower Bridge, in one of London's shopping arcades, etc, that makes of the film something rooted in a tangible and recognisable reality. No one watches the theatre with its old-fangled tricks, as kids prefer instead to go on merry-go-rounds and play on their PSPs. This is no documentary, but the fact that the cast has to struggle against their environement, and that sometimes they must even work hard just to be seen given (Gilliam's predilection for night time scenes when out and about in London), makes it a film to which one can connect with far greater ease than with Jeunet's film.
Jeunet's film is childish: it makes up its own rules and it even resorts on occasion to nob gags (when it is not self-consciously trying to have 'Amélie' appeal), and it alienates (me) as a result. Gilliam's, on the other hand, does offer a childish perspective on the world, made most clear when Anton emerges to scupper Tony's evil plans in the form of a child, but it is a world in which children get exploited and smacked, where the threat of child abduction looms (an irate parent thinking the paedo theatre performers have nicked his kid), where drunkards can emerge from anywhere and threaten the safety of the film world at any moment. It is an adult consideration of being a child, or how an adult reconciles the desire to be childish in a threatening world. In Micmacs, there is an identified and not very threatening pair of villains, but no random threats. In other words, what I hated most about Gilliam's working methods as exposed in the afore-mentioned Fulton and Pepe's Lost in La Mancha (UK/USA, 2002) is in fact what perhaps makes Parnassus the superior of these two films (in my eyes): its chaos.
Trouble can and does come from anywhere, and the lack of control over the actors, their seemingly freefalling delivery, the descent into a place that might have rules but which we do not know is more interesting that Jeunet's films where there are no rules, and we know this from too early on (the characters do not even seem to need to learn this).
Bazil in Micmacs pretends to be a robot when busking for money. Like Parnassus, Micmacs is also concerned with the mechanising effects of the contemporary world. Furthermore, both films share a nostalgia for the lo-fi and genuine effect - a skirt dancing on a hanger, a bunch of flowers pulled from sleeve - even though both films also have digital wizardry going on up to the hilt. But where in Jeunet's film - a film about arms dealers! - no one is ever in any danger. In Gilliam's film, the world's got teeth and shit can happen at any time.
Perhaps the death of Heath Ledger during shooting changed the fabric of Parnassus in such a way that we are all too aware of this (and thus it is knowledge about the film as much as the film itself that helps to give this impression). Gambling on Heath Ledger's soul is not a wager worth taking to make a great film. By which I mean to say that the it is not a good thing that Ledger died in order for Gilliam to make an interesting film. But it is a fitting tribute to Ledger, if tribute can here be an appropriate term, that Gilliam's film does, unlike Jeunet's, remain rooted in a difficult and therefore more real world in which fantasy should only serve as an avenue to death or rebirth, not as an avenue as escape from or denial of the chaos that surrounds us all.
Tags: andrew garfield, cinema, dany boon, fantasy, film, heath ledger, jean-pierre jeunet, micmacs a tire-larigot, terry gilliam, the imaginarium of doctor par…
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