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Smoothest. Paragraph. Ever.
Released in 2001, four years after his work on the infamous trainwreck known as Alien Resurrection, Amelie is arguably Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s most famous work, which I base off of the fact that it’s the only one of his films that I’ve actually seen people besides me talk about. At the very least it is his most successful film since his debut, Delicatessen, receiving not only the Cèsar (France’s national film award) for Best Film and Best Director but also his only Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film, and pulling in 174 million dollars on a 10 million dollar budget. It is also the first Jeunet film to not feature the talents of fellow Frenchman Marc Caro, the collaboration which produced Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and which was eventually brought to an end by Alien Resurrection (according to wikipedia). Instead we have Monsieur Guillaume Laurant, who co-wrote this film and would later co-write Jeunet’s latest film, 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. It’s not an unnoticeable difference as I’ll touch upon later, and while it is a shame a partnership that created such interesting films fell apart it also happened over two decades ago so it seems silly to be upset about it now. It’s also possible that Amelie wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the Jeunet/Caro dissolution, and as this is a review (more or less) of Amelie I feel a sense of obligation to support its existence so that I can justify writing about it. As I would for any movie that isn’t Dr. Fugazzi. So let’s get to it.
On September 3rd 1973 in near Montmartre in Paris, Amelie Poulain is born. A neglected child, split between an aloof father and a neurotic mother, is forced to retreat into dreams and fantasies as a series of unfortunate events pushes her through a painfully isolated adolescence. Five years after the death of her mother in a darkly comedic accident, Amelie’s life is not quite as her dreams might have lead her to believe. She has an apartment, a job as a waitress in a bar/cafe known as The Two Windmills, and she has a handful of odd folks that she might call friends, but none of of it can compare to her daydreams. Then again, what life could?
Then one day, the same day that Princess Diana had her fatal accident in fact, Amelie discovers a box of trinkets in her apartment, hidden by a boy named Dominique Bretodeau over 40 years ago. Amelie, still chomping at the bit for a change of pace, decides to track down the now senior Bretodeau and return the box to him, and when she sees the look of happiness on his face she is filled with an enormous sense of accomplishment and well-being. So much so in fact that she decides she wants to help more people, and so turns her attention to her friends and neighbors, each with their own set of neuroses and problems that she needs to travail. However, when she happens to meet a young, handsome man named Nino, who just so happens to have the same kind of weird hobbies as her, it soon becomes clear that Amelie is going to need some help of her own.
Amelie sees the return of many familiar faces for Jeunet fans; Dominique Pinon, Rufus, Ticky Holgado, but the obvious stand out performer is newcomer Audrey Tautou in the titular role of Amelie Poulain. Looking at her in 2018, it honestly feels like the she was the blueprint for what would eventually become known as the ‘hipster girl’. Short hair, unflashy fashion sense, interest in weird things, not traditionally ‘sexy’ but attractive in a slightly androgynous David Bowie kind of way, that exudes a kind of mischievous energy and social awkwardness that brings all the introverts to the yard. Give her a latte and a vinyl record and you’ve probably seen about a dozen Amelies around your local college campus. It works though, because Audrey works. The way she looks and moves, the way she smiles, it meshes perfectly with the character, without any need for dialogue (although that area is okay as well). Seeing her on screen you can tell how she managed to pull several Best Actress awards off of her debut film, Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty Institute, and why Jeunet would bring her back for his next film, A Very Long Engagement. When she’s on screen you want to see more of her, and when she’s not you’re waiting for her to come back. That’s what you call stage presence.
Now because I promised it earlier, the big difference between Amelie and the early Jeunet-Caro films is one of whimsy vs. caprice. All three films carry this feeling of heightened reality, where magic feels like it could exist even if it doesn’t, but if you’ll recall from The City of Lost Children write up I mentioned that it and Delicatessen were intentionally made as tributes to Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam is a capricious director. Yes his films take place in strange magical worlds, but they’re not exactly very nice worlds either. In the first ever Gilliam film we ever covered on this blog for example, Jabberwocky, Michael Palin plays an utter dunce who is constantly abused by the people around him, Time Bandits has a child traveling through time with a band of surly dwarvish thieves (and that ending…), Baron Munchausen is a pompous ass throughout the entire film (although you warm up to him), and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has a murderous child organ thief in a major role. These are not fairy tales that Gilliam is telling us folks, these are bawdy pub stories, full of grimy, bizarre places and the sad and mean people who live in them. That’s the essence of Gilliam’s films, that sudden, blatant intrusion of reality into fantasy, that Jeunet & Caro attempted to replicate in their own films. Quite well, in my opinion, although it’s been a while since I saw Delicatessen.
Amelie, on the other hand, is whimsical. There’s no grime in this world, just lovely architecture that houses precisely designed rooms, where our quirky protagonist and their eccentric friends have quirky, eccentric fun together. Sure, sometimes bad things happen, but everything is so explosively colorful and hey man life is like that sometimes so whatever. Rather than Terry Gilliam, it would probably be more appropriate to compare it to the works of Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, or Bryan Fuller’s cult comedy series Pushing Up Daisies, which in retrospect apes so much of the Amelie style you’d think it was some kind of weird fanfiction. Pretty people and upbeat gallows humor, you get the idea.
That’s where the enjoyment of the film is going to hinge for you, I suppose. If the idea of quirky characters being quirky around each other and falling in love sounds like something you’d be into, then this is definitely the movie for you. If not, then it’s two hours of that thing I just said, so be warned. Personally I ended up liking it, despite not generally being a romance movie kind of guy. I found Amelie and the cast likable enough, the writing generally witty, and the romance being at the very least more believable than The Shape of Water. The 2 hour runtime is a bit of an issue, I feel like they drag the build up a bit too long and that the payoff is smaller than it should have been, but overall I think it manages to entertain fairly consistently the whole way through. In spite of its obvious lack of Ron Perlman, that is.
Well cross Amelie off of the bucket list, finally, and while you’re at it mark it down for a recommendation. It might not be what you might expect from a movie on Halloween, and how many times have I said that on these lists, but it is a fun movie, and potentially capable of filling the cockles of your heart with a warm, fuzzy feeling (as a person without a heart I can only speculate). Grab a bowl of popcorn and a significant other and enjoy. You might not get spooked, but at least you’ll be happy.
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