Pros: Witty, visually stylish, beautifully paced, wonderfully sentimental, and great performance by Tautou
Cons: A small minority of viewers will find it too sweetly sentimental
The Bottom Line: A sweet, cheerful, and witty drama featuring the incomparably charming Audrey Tautou as Amélie, living life to the fullest on the frontier of imagination
Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Amélie is a sweet, whimsical modern fairytale with a style and feel all its own. It seems to have been expressly designed to fill viewers with wonder, awe, and warm fuzzy feelings, by combining light-hearted drama and quirky humor into a cheerful confection that melts the heart.
The Story: The film begins with an quirky prologue – an illustrated history, if you will, of Amélie Poulin’s childhood, recited by a droll narratator and acted out by a young Amélie, played by Flor Guiet (thoroughly hamming it up). Young Amélie is a clever little pixie, but a lonely child with eccentric parents. Her mother was rather neurotic but died early in Amélie’s life, rather bizarrely, being squashed by a suicide jumper right outside the spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral. Amélie’s father, Raphaël Poulin (Rufus), was a physician who was rather emotionally distant, never touching or hugging Amélie except when providing her monthly checkups. The feel of her father’s touch so excited the affection-starved little girl that it made her heart beat fast, leading her father to erroneously conclude that Amélie had a heart flutter. Consequently, she was schooled at home, isolated from other kids, and generally sheltered and overprotected. In this insular existence, Amélie’s imagination became her sole companion. After her mother’s death, Amélie’s father became preoccupied with building a perfect crèche in the yard for his wife’s urn, while generally ignoring poor Amélie.
Now a young adult, Amélie (Audrey Tautou) lives alone in an apartment and works as a waitress in a corner café in Paris called the “Two Windmills.” She’s shy, though a bit mischievous. With the aid of the narrator, viewers learn that underneath her reserve, Amélie is both smart and sensitive, full of imagination, sweet and simple, yet complex. She is somewhat lacking in social skills, has no boyfriend, and, though she gets along well enough with her co-workers, has no close friends among them. Amélie is a delicate and demure flower starving for affection.
One day, while watching a newscast on TV in her apartment, Amélie learns about the death of Princess Diana and her surprise causes her to drop a bauble that she was holding. The bauble knocks off a baseboard tile and reveals a secret hiding place, where Amélie soon discovers a long-forgotten rusty box with childhood treasures – marbles and minature metal racing cars. Amélie spontaneously makes a momentous decision. She will try to find the owner of this long lost treasure and, if that effort succeeds, she will devote her life to good deeds. True to her impulse, Amélie locates Monsieur Bretadeau (Maurice Benichou), returns his cache of childhood memories anonymously, and then observes from a distance how her secret act of good will has brought rapturous tears to the eyes of the recipient. Inspired by this success, Amélie begins a career of orchestrating small miracles like an undercover saint.
The beneficiaries of Amélie’s good deeds include a blind man, who she helps across the street and then accompanies for several blocks, describing to him in vivid detail everything along the street, thrilling the man with a few minutes of vicarious sight. She turns her magic also on two of her co-workers at the café: her fellow waitress Gina (Clotilde Mollet), who is hounded by a jealous ex-boyfriend, Joseph (Dominique Pinon) (whose pushed in face and protruding lips make him look like a beat-up boxer), and the hypochondriac tobacconist, Georgette (Isabelle Nanty), who yearns for love. Amélie plays a subtle game of matchmaking that shifts Joseph’s unwanted affection for Gina to Georgette, where it is welcome – at least initially. Amélie’s good Samaritan activities also extend in the direction of Lucien (Jamel Debbouze), the abused and slow-witted assistant of the local grocer Collignon (Urbain Cancelier). Collignon is the closest thing to a genuine bad guy in this movie and, with him, Amélie becomes something on an avenging angel, with great humorous effect! Another beneficiary of Amélie’s good-hearted meddling is her grief-stricken concierge (landlady), Madeleine Wallace (Yolande Moreau), who has been mourning for decades a cheating husband who, she believes, died loving another woman. Amélie fakes a last letter from the husband, in which he expresses regret over leaving Madeleine, his one true love, and arranges for it to be “recently found”. Then there is Raymond Dufayel (Serge Merlin), known as the glass-man, a neighbor with brittle bones who never leaves his apartment for fear of injury. He is a painter who paints a copy of Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” once each year. He is the only one of Amélie’s projects that is on to her secret acts of kindness and gives back to her in kind. Then there’s Hipolito (Artus de Penguern), an unpublished writer, who finds quotations from his works “published” as graffiti. Perhaps closest to home among Amélie’a projects is her own melancholy father . She kidnaps his garden gnome and has it photographed in front of landmarks all over the world and arranges for postcards to be sent to her father by the gnome, which opens her father’s eyes to a new world of possibilities.
So far so good, but our stealthy changer of lives has yet to come to grips with her own loneliness. Taking risks with her own life and heart will require even greater courage. This challenge shifts rapidly from theoretical to imperative when she spies a shy and eccentric young man, Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz). The mysterious Nino scavenges photographs from the automatic photo booths in metro stations and mounts them in a scrapbook. Amélie is all the more attracted to him after she finds an album that he dropped and peruses its content. She discovers that he works in a porno shop selling sex toys and also as a clown in the fun-house at the circus. She sets up a kind of cat-and-mouse game to return his photo album, leaving a sequence of clues. He becomes the detective and pursuer and she the mystery. They are a perfect match – if only they can get together.
Production Values: Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has given us a sweet-natured feel-good movie that is sure to provide pure satisfaction for most viewers. Jeunet is no stranger to visual inventiveness, since it was featured in some of his previous films, including Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), but those earlier films were more macabre than sentimental. Amélie carries Jeunet’s predilection for visual experimentation to a dynamic and vibrant level of expression. A share of the credit probably belongs with the set designer, Marie-Laure Valla, and the cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel. The sets are filled with colorful props. The room décor is flooded with bright colors, as are the costumes and make-up. This is wild Technicolor at its best, visually stylish and invigorating.
Amélie has a surreal feeling about it, beginning with the deadpan, omniscient narrator and his witty and sardonic observations. Then, Amélie herself interacts not only with the other characters but also occasionally with the narrator or the audience, talking, in one instance, directly into the camera. The film seems to be taking place partly in the world of imagination, such as when Amélie melts into a puddle of water upon seeing Nino up close. Another time, photographs in an album begin to talk. This film lets our imagination run wild with Amélie’s. Paris itself is something of a silent character in the film – not the Paris of the tourist traps but a wondrous Paris of the imagination, where magic abounds and serendipity lurks around each corner.
Amélie is genuinely amusing and sometimes outrageously funny. The humor ranges from comical vignettes and farcical pranks to witty comebacks. There is some wicked dark humor as well, such as the manner of the mother’s death and Amélie’s pet goldfish, Blubber, attempting suicide by jumping out of its bowl. Best of all, though, is the creativeness of Amélie’s ingenious stratagems for bringing happiness to her targeted beneficiaries. When the situation calls for delivering a comeuppance, Amélie proves that she can be a real imp.
Especially noteworthy is the way that Jeunet never allows the pace of the film to slacken. It is a steady vivacious blur of brilliance that keeps us in its grip for the entire two hour length. By continuously varying the sets and shot angles and using quick edits, Jeunet ensures an energetic pace in which one compelling moment gives way to another. Jeunet is almost obsessive in his attention to detail. He had one scene audience tested before including it to make sure that it would elicit the right response. It is obvious that Jeunet is a real student of human nature, both from the content of the film and his skillful directing.
Jeunet certainly deserves tremendous credit for this film, but the film’s success belongs as much to Audrey Tautou as to any other factor. She has good old fashion charisma – an adorable innocence and eccentricity, highlighted by a sweet face, sardonic smile and bright eyes. For all of her shy prettiness, however, Tautou is also a brilliant actress. Given a part with minimal dialogue, she skillfully conveyed meaning with facial expression, subtle glances, and body movements. Her amazing performance was full of both passion and innocence, convincing us that Amélie is a woman with a child’s point of view, inhabiting both the real world and the world of imagination. She wins our sympathy from the beginning, twirls it around her pinky, and holds on to it to the very end.
Mathieu Kassovitz who played Nino is a versatile contributor to French film-making, as both actor and director. He won acclaim as director of Hate (see my review at Hate) and performed in Birthday Girl, starring Nicole Kidman.
Bottom-LineAmélie was the top grossing foreign film in 2001 and won critical accolades all over the world. It made its first splash at the Cannes Film Festival by not being selected for an award. It fared even better with viewers than critics, garnering viewer awards at the film festivals in Toronto, Edinburgh and Chicago. It received five Academy Award nominations. Amélie is rated R for nudity and sex. The DVD version includes a rich assortment of extras in a two-disk set. These bonus features include segments on the making of the movie, Tautou’s screen test, Tautou’s hairstyles in the film, outtakes and bloopers, trailers and TV spots, interviews with various members of the cast and crew, and a short relating to the fifteen orgasm sequence of the film. I counted 65 of 70 Epinion reviewers rating Amélie at either five stars or four, which probably represents a pretty good indication of the percentage of viewers who find the film delightful. The main complaint cited by the small number of nay-sayers is excessive sweetness. If your tolerance for a sweet and sentimental drama/comedy is low, you might want to look elsewhere, but for everyone else, I highly recommend this lovely film.
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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:
Amlie Poulain Audrey Tautou is a young woman who glides through the streets of Paris as quietly as a mouse. With wide eyes and a tiny grin she sees th...More at Family Video
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