Tomb

If you’re familiar with Twilight’s merchandise, you’ve likely encountered T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob.” Fans of the books and films are encouraged to root for one of the series’ hunks to wind up with Bella, Twilight’s heroine. Essentially, by wearing your gang colours, you're announcing to the world that you think a teenage girl should hook up with either a vampire or a werewolf.

This seems a bit peculiar to me. Twilight enthusiasts surely know how the books end, right? It's like sports fans wearing team jerseys and watching last year's game, hoping that the sheer force of their enthusiasm will cause a time warp and alter the final score.

But hey, fan merchandise has always been a bit dopey. People just like to show affection for movie characters by buying stuff. I once owned an action figure of “IG-88,” the robotic bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back (1980), a character who not only had no lines, but who didn't even move. I'm pretty sure he was played by a hat stand with plastic junk hot-glued onto it.

So yeah, I can kind of see the appeal of pointless fan allegiances. I was thinking about this after watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet's delightful new film Micmacs (2009). Micmacs is a brazenly off-kilter revenge tale, put together with all — or at least some — of the twee sprightliness you'd expect from the director of Amelie (2001) paired with the lyrical weirdness you'd expect from the director of The City of Lost Children (1995). And yes, like Twilight, there’s a love triangle.

The main character is Bazil (Dany Boon), a guy with a life-threatening bullet lodged in his head, who is taking revenge on two wealthy arms manufacturers who have indirectly ruined his life. He is aided by a wacky band of misfits who live together in a junkyard, each with one unique talent and a blind loyalty to Bazil’s quest. Seriously, they all just show up one day and demand to help him — it's like they recognize him as the protagonist and ask if they can be his supporting cast.

There's a crusty old inventor of contraptions. There’s a kindly landlady-chef. There’s a guy who speaks entirely in clichés (and not in the usual movie sense, either. Instead, he throws sayings like “kill two birds with one stone” or “it never rains, but it pours” into every single thing he says). There’s a human cannonball. And rounding things out, there’s a female contortionist (Julie Ferrier) who likes to hide in refrigerators and a cute bespectacled girl (Marie-Julie Baup) who can estimate distance and other measurements perfectly.

The latter two characters are presented as potential love interests for Bazil, and it's tough guessing who he'll wind up with since each has virtually no depth. Heck, they don’t even have proper names: Ferrier's flexible temptress is credited as La Môme Caoutchouc (The Elastic Girl) and Baup's adorably geeky mathematician is simply called Calculette (meaning “Calculator,” or perhaps in this case, “Calculatrix”). Oddly enough, it's this lack of characterization that makes the love-triangle speculation irresistible. One girl is really bendy, the other is good at math. That's all we know, so our dedication to Team Elastic Woman or Team Calculatrix is dependent on either the chemistry between the leads or the viewer's personal taste.

Is this how it worked in Twilight? Do Jacob and Edward have any real depth? Seriously, I'm asking because I don't know — I still haven't read or seen it.

Elastic Woman has the early edge – she has a meet-cute with the hero, startling him by emerging from a refrigerator. She meets newcomers the same way dogs greet each other, with a suspicious-but-curious stare and far-too-close eye contact complete with a little flinch. Thankfully, there’s no butt-sniffing here, though she's flexible enough that she could complete the task by her lonesome (and her constant bending and stretching can provoke an impure thought or two).

Still, there’s no need to rule out Calculatrix, all librarian glasses and dweeb-ish sex appeal. It's likely the character, as written, had no real chemistry with Bazil until Baup took on the role. She fleshes out her virtually flat character with several hungry glances at the hero, culminating in a delicious eyes-closed imaginary kiss as she watches him from afar.

Personally, I was rooting for Bazil to hook up with the sweet video store girl or the singing busker in the subway station. Perhaps the casting director simply put too many interesting and adorable actresses in the cast. Ah, France.

So, what do you say, readers? Maybe it's time that French art-house flicks started selling cheesy merchandise as well.