Amelie is the sort of film that makes you want to talk about it as soon as you finish watching. It’s a fabulously romantic, heartbreakingly sweet, quirkily hilarious film that would – if the world really was a civilized place – redefine the romantic comedy genre by yanking it out of the morass of predictable formula and giving it some vitality and inspiration.
This is the story of a young woman is search of herself. Amelie (Audrey Tautou) is a refugee from a loveless childhood (having grown up “slung between a neurotic and an iceberg,” says the narrator) who is doing her best to carry on. Sweet and quiet, she goes about her daily business without making a splash, reserving all strong feeling for her flights of fantasy. She is interested in fixing other people’s messy lives – quietly and without them even knowing it – but not her own. Like a one-woman guerrilla force promoting happiness for the downtrodden, she arranges romance at the Montmartre café where she works, between a miserable co-worker and a sour-verging-on-psychotic regular customer. She sabotages the home life of the nasty local grocer – in hilarious ways – in order to buy relief for his downtrodden assistant. She inspires an elderly shut-in neighbour with video clips of unusual ‘live for the moment’ scenes. She sends her stultified father’s garden gnome on a world tour – arranging for photos to be sent to him, of the gnome at a Cambodian ruin, the gnome at the Empire State Building, and so on.
Of course, at some point, ‘physician, heal thyself’ must come into play, as the painfully shy and socially isolated Amelie is most certainly in need of this sort of tonic in her own life. It starts to happen when Amelie finds a lost photo album near an automatic photo portrait booth. She’s intrigued; her hyperactive imagination is stirred by dreams of the album’s owner and Amelie wonders about the bald man whose picture appears frequently among the ripped-up and recomposed portraits in the album. When she discovers the identity of the owner – Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a similarly imaginative young man who splits his working hours between cashiering at a pornography shop and scaring people in an amusement park ride – she is forced to choose between meeting him or continuing to hide from life.
While it’s unlike any romantic comedy you’re going to see, Amelie is at once extremely funny and intensely romantic. Those who have experienced terrible shyness (and who hasn’t?) will find Amelie’s fears painfully familiar. Those who know the bliss of a dream come true will likewise yearn for her success. The script is bang-on smart and consistently funny, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s extremely active direction works well, and the performances – especially that of Tautou, who imbues Amelie with both a delightful mischievousness and a sweet fragility – are satisfying.
The film’s visual style is great fun, establishing a quirky tone that never lags from the start of the film to the end. Quick cuts during the film’s opening narration set the scene and start things off humorously. There’s liberal – but well thought out – use of time-lapse, fast and slow motion. Photos, paintings and sculpture occasionally come to life, casting knowing glances at each other, or offering Amelie or Nino advice. And when Amelie chickens out in a would-be romantic moment, she melts to the floor – quite literally.
Amelie is a beautiful film – tonic for the romantically challenged and a breath of fresh air for all but the most long-gone of cinematic cynics.
