Jean-Pierre Jeunet took the Paramount stage briefly Saturday to introduce his latest film, Micmacs à tire-larigot, clarifying the title (saying that it translates to ‘shenanigans’ in English, a word he loves) and warned against leaving early, as he had a list of everyone in attendance and would find anyone who exited before the movie’s end.

In a nutshell: The film centers on Bazil (Dany Boon), whose solitary existence began young when his military father was killed by a landmine and his mother falls apart as a result. Flash forward a decade or two, and Bazil is still leading a basic, quiet life, working as a clerk in a video store and lip-synching along to the old movies that appear to be his only close acquaintances when a random drive-by shooting leaves him wounded, a bullet left lodged in his brain. The injury results in him becoming unemployed and homeless, and after a bit he is taken under the wing of a makeshift family of misfits, living together and creating whimsical inventions. When he discovers that the bullet that injured him was made by the same corporation that produced the landmine that killed his father, he sets out to exact his own unusual, labyrinthine form of revenge — and his housemates insist upon helping him.

What follows is a series of elaborate, amusing, and highly improbable shenanigans targeting the financial and personal lives of two arms dealers, utilizing the unique skill sets of Bazil and his housemates (mechanical engineering, the flexibility of a contortionist, a scientific measurement savant, and more.) Suspension of disbelief is key here, as it is in most of Jeunet’s films — the fact that this group of people, with just the right skill set to perform just the right tasks came together at just the right time to help Bazil is either very contrived or the ultimate twist of fate, depending on how you view these things.

What makes me inclined to suspend disbelief and lean toward the ‘fate’ option are two things: the artful manner in which Jeunet constructs this insanity (it’s the most ornate creative revenge screwball comedy you can imagine), and the fact that he creates a template for revenge that eschews violence and feels more akin to right than justice. His form of revenge, shared via YouTube at the film’s end, suggests that he really does want the viewers to absorb the rebellious nature of his story and use it in their own lives, using their own personal skill sets to set things right — nonviolently — in their own way. In a time of bank failures and bailouts, megacorporation takeovers and lost jobs, homes, families, Jeunet seeks to remind us that we can do something, if we put our creative minds to it. In his own inimitable way, he’s used cartoon-like characters (echoes of Wile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner, Spy vs. Spy, even Charlie Chaplin) to entertain and help the medicine go down, a sort of whimsical punk-rock big screen manifesto.

It’s not an emotional masterpiece (too many characters to become deeply involved with any one), but it is charmingly, wittily inspirational, things one just doesn’t encounter in theaters often enough lately.