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Amelie

2001, Movie, R, 120 mins

Amelie: Review

AMELIE | LE FABULEUX DESTIN D'AMELIE POULAIN
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An eccentric wallflower finds her soul mate in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's aggressively sunny romance, which was a huge hit in its native France. Amelie Poulain (Flora Guiet) was destined to be a lonely dreamer: Her overprotective parents isolated her from the world, her neurotic mother (Lorella Cravotta) was killed in a bizarre accident and even her beloved goldfish was suicidal, repeatedly leaping from its bowl. As a shy young woman, the gamine Amelie (Audrey Tautou) lives in the funky Paris neighborhood of Montmartre and waits tables at the cafe Les Deux Moulins. Disappointed by her first forays into the world of dating, Amelie devotes herself to cultivating life's small pleasures — skipping stones on the Canal Saint Martin, cracking the glaze on a creme caramel, observing inconsequential details in the background of old movies — and waits for her purpose in life to be revealed. Her destiny announces itself in the form of a decades-old tin box filled with children's toys, which she finds behind a wall in her apartment. Amelie resolves to locate the owner and anonymously return the childhood treasures, and when that mission goes well she starts meddling in the lives of her coworkers, family and neighbors. Amelie launches a whimsical plan to persuade her father (Rufus) to resurrect his dormant dream of traveling (it involves a peripatetic garden gnome); fixes up two neurotic acquaintances (Dominique Pinon, Isabelle Nanty); devises a series of petty torments for a rude greengrocer (Urbain Chancellier); brightens the life of her unhappy concierge (Yolande Moreau), and befriends M. Dufayel (Serge Merlin), the reclusive, elderly painter who lives downstairs. It's he who suggests gently that perhaps Amelie should try to work her magic on her own life, and so she pursues Nino Quicampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), a fellow every bit as odd as she. Some viewers will find this frenetic valentine to oddballs everywhere intolerably sugary, but it has a bizarre edge that cuts the sticky sentimentality. Jeunet's lifelong love of cartoons and puppet animation is evident, and by digitally tweaking virtually every image, he creates a world no less fantastic — if far cheerier — than that of DELICATESSEN (1991) or THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995). It's unfortunate that Amelie and Nino are less characters than aggregations of quirky character traits, but the lanky, wide-eyed Tautou is so phenomenally charming — her smile could sweeten vinegar — as to make Amelie irresistible. That Kassovitz is less winning hardly matters; Tautou's charisma conquers all. (In French, with English subtitles.) leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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Amelie: Le Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (The French Film Guides) (French Edition)
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