France, R, 122 m, 2001
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Stars Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, et al. 

French visionary Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie is a striking exodus from the director’s customarily dour approach to moviemaking, but the unexpectedly blithe and chirpy tone never seems labored. Jeunet may be splitting from form, but Amelie doesn’t signify a crass and calculated attempt to penetrate the mainstream; it’s genuinely affable. Though he was mining the darker regions of the human condition in Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and the criminally undervalued Alien Resurrection, Jeunet’s askew wit and appetite for the fantastic guided the pictures, and his trademark wit and whimsy reaches an epoch in Amelie. 

The title role of Amelie is played by Audrey Tautou, a refreshingly unconventional French beauty who alternately put me in the mind of Audrey Hepburn and a space alien. Amelie grows up in a household so drained of affection that her pet goldfish keeps attempting suicide by diving out of its bowl. The fish is eventually set free when Amelie’s parents drop it into a stream from an overhead bridge. In one of the movie’s more affecting moments, the fish stares back at Amelie from beneath the water as if he’s beckoning her to swim away with him. The falling fish becomes a motif in the film as Amelie’s mother soon casts herself from the towers of Notre Dame and later as a full-grown Amelie drops a bottle cap upon hearing the news of Princess Diana’s death. The cap rolls and knocks loose a tile in the bathroom wall of her cramped apartment, leading Amelie to the discovery of a corroded tin filled with a little boy’s possessions. Amelie commits herself to finding the owner of the box, and her arduous search results in the now middle-aged man enjoying some poignant reminiscences. Amelie is so tickled by the cheerfulness she brings to the man that she sets out to do a whole host of good deeds—though not in any straightforward and trouble-free fashion. Amelie is incapable of going from point A to B without visiting the rest of the alphabet first, so she dreams up a variety of convoluted ploys to help enrich peoples’ lives. And yet, sadly, she neglects her own. That is until she meets Nino. Played by director Mathieu Kassovitz, Nino spends any downtime from his cruddy job in an adult emporium by collecting discarded snapshots and reassembling their torn pieces in a scrapbook. One day Amelie sees him accidentally drop the book, and during her trek to return it to him, she develops a crush on the somewhat cagey fellow. Alas, it isn’t in Amelie’s nature to approach Nino directly, so she hatches yet another series of Rube Goldberg-like schemes to alert Nino to her feelings for him.  

In the hands of a lesser director, Amelie might’ve degenerated into just another banal romantic comedy, but Jeunet is a truly original voice in cinema, and he packs each frame with enough figurative data for a dozen intelligent films. As in The City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection, Jeunet makes use of a lot of showy camera work to keep the movie visually charged, but his penchant for the ostentatious is rarely to the detriment of the central action. Jeunet is a fantasist, so the quirky mise en scène appears right in step with the story’s whimsical elements. Amelie is probably filled with as many special effects as Alien Resurrection, but they’re more daintily applied here. Jeunet augments the movie’s fanciful atmosphere with a keen digital enhancement of Paris: he strikes unwanted passersby, reshapes clouds to his liking, and adds a storybook sheen to the otherwise grubby environs. The ethereal payoff demands repeated viewing to sufficiently comprehend how full-dress the director’s work was on this picture. And I can’t wait to watch it again for Amelie is one of the most joyous and imaginative pictures I’ve seen since Babe: Pig in the City. It’s a practically perfect piece of filmmaking.   

December 26, 2001

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.