Micmacs 2010

Bazil, Dany Boon, is a boy whose future is shaped by a brutal memory: his father, a military man, is killed when a land mine explodes while trying to defuse it in the Western Sahara. Fast forward thirty years, and Bazil is a young man working in a Paris video rental shop when a stray bullet from a street shoot-out lodges in his forehead. Doctors save him but decide against removing the bullet, fearing further brain damage. He returns to work only to discover he has been replaced, and as he leaves, his replacement hands him a shell casing—the very fragment that marked his life’s turning point.

With a talent for mime and sign language, Bazil drifts into homelessness as a busker until Slammer, a former convict who survived a guillotine, welcomes him to Tire-Larigots, a shelter tucked beneath a mountain of recycled junk. There he forms friendships with a colorful crew: Elastic Girl, a contortionist; Mama Chow, who feeds and cares for everyone; Remington, an ethnographer who speaks in old-fashioned clichés; Buster, a former human cannonball; Tiny Pete, an artist who assembles moving sculptures from salvaged trash; and Calculator, a keen young woman who reads people’s movements with a single glance. Together, they share a sense of community and resilience.

During a scavenging expedition, Bazil discovers the offices and factories of the two firms that made the landmine that orphaned him and the bullet that struck him—situated on opposite sides of a street. He tries to obtain compensation at the landmine-maker’s offices but is violently dismissed by orders from the CEO Nicolas Thibault de Fenouillet. Undeterred, he infiltrates the rival company and overhears a speech by its CEO, François Marconi, revealing a changing chessboard of power and profits.

Bazil follows Marconi to his home, where he rigs a microphone down the chimney and overhears a phone conversation arranging a meeting with Omar Boulounga, a dictator seeking arms for an upcoming conflict. Bazil and the Tire-Larigots crew decide to intervene, launching a plan to cripple Boulounga’s men by planting drugs on them at an airport.

Remington, posing as Boulounga’s right-hand man, then makes contact with De Fenouillet and Marconi, weaving a tangled web of deception. He cancels the intended deal and tells each CEO that he will be dealing with the other, provoking a fierce feud between the two arms-dealing magnates. Bazil and his friends retaliate by railroading a series of daring acts: breaking into Marconi’s home to tamper with his luxury cars, stealing De Fenouillet’s collection of body-part relics from historical figures, and destroying a truckload of bombs at Marconi’s plant. Marconi soon suspects De Fenouillet and plots to sabotage De Fenouillet’s factory, escalating the war.

Elastic Girl infiltrates Marconi’s apartment in search of blackmail material while Bazil waits on the roof, listening in. When Marconi arrives unexpectedly, Elastic Girl hides in a refrigerator, and De Fenouillet’s armed men attack Marconi. Boulounga’s men strike first and capture Marconi, and De Fenouillet’s side retaliates, shooting the Boulounga faction. In the ensuing chaos, Bazil is captured on the roof, and the two CEOs realize they have been outmaneuvered by an unseen third party.

The two executives are taken to a safe house for questioning. Elastic Girl emerges to rally the crew, and after a high-octane car chase through Paris, Bazil is rescued and Marconi and De Fenouillet are captured. Bound and hooded, they are forced to confront a staged spectacle: a desert setting with a live grenade in one man’s mouth and a live land mine beneath the other. A crowd watches, holding photographs of landmine victims, while Bazil and his friends reveal themselves in disguise to be the true audience—this whole “show” was a setup.

The reveal continues in a cinematic flashback inspired by Mission: Impossible, showing that the entire plane journey and the desert illusion were deliberately faked; the desert backdrop was simply a Paris suburb cleared for the scene. Bazil and Calculator upload the real video to YouTube, exposing the corrupt arms dealers to the world. The result is public disgrace for Marconi and De Fenouillet, who are undone by their own greed. In the aftermath, Bazil and Elastic Girl, who become a couple, find a new sense of belonging and justice born from their shared plan and the community that stood with them.