Psycho's Movie Reviews #211: Amelie (2001)

Amélie (also known as Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain; aka, The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain) is a 2001 romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jeunet with Guillaume Laurant, the film is a whimsical depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre. It tells the story of a shy waitress, played by Audrey Tautou, who decides to change the lives of those around her for the better while struggling with her own isolation. The film also features an ensemble cast of supporting roles, including Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta, Serge Merlin, Jamel Debbouze, Claire Maurier, Clotilde Mollet, Isabelle Nanty, Dominique Pinon, Artus de Penguern, Yolande Moreau, Urbain Cancelier, and Maurice Bénichou.

The film was theatrically released in France on 25 April 2001 by UGC-Fox Distribution and in Germany on 16 August 2001 by Prokino Filmverleih. The film received critical acclaim, with praise for Tautou's performance, the cinematography, production design, and writing. Amélie won Best Film at the European Film Awards; it also won four César Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. It won two British Academy Film Awards, including Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. The film was a commercial success, grossing $174.2 million worldwide against a budget of $10 million, and is one of the biggest international successes for a French film.

Plot

Amélie Poulain is born in June 1974 and brought up by eccentric parents who – incorrectly believing that she has a heart defect – decide to home-school her. To cope with her loneliness, Amélie develops an active imagination and a mischievous personality. When Amélie is six, her mother, Amandine, is killed when a suicidal Canadian tourist jumps from the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris and lands on her. As a result, her father Raphaël withdraws more and more from society. Amélie leaves home at the age of 18 and becomes a waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre, which is staffed and frequented by a collection of eccentrics. She is single and lets her imagination roam freely, finding contentment in simple pleasures like dipping her hand into grain sacks and cracking crème brûlée with a spoon.

On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Amélie drops a plastic perfume-stopper, which dislodges a wall tile and accidentally reveals an old metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier. Amélie resolves to track down the boy and return the box to him. She promises herself that if it makes him happy, she will devote her life to bringing happiness to others.

After asking the apartment's concierge and several old tenants about the boy's identity, Amélie meets her reclusive neighbour, Raymond Dufayel, an artist with brittle bone disease who repaints Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party every year. He recalls the boy's name as "Bretodeau". Amélie quickly finds the man, Dominique Bretodeau, and surreptitiously gives him the box. Moved to tears by the discovery and the memories it holds, Bretodeau resolves to reconcile with his estranged daughter and the grandson he has never met. Amélie happily embarks on her new mission.

Amélie secretly executes complex schemes that positively affect the lives of those around her. She escorts a blind man to the Métro station, giving him a rich description of the street scenes he passes. She persuades her father to follow his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and having a flight attendant friend airmail pictures of it posing with landmarks from all over the world. She starts a romance between her hypochondriacal co-worker Georgette and Joseph, one of the customers in the bar. She convinces Madeleine Wallace, the concierge of her block of flats, that the husband who abandoned her had sent her a final conciliatory love letter just before his accidental death years before. She gaslights Collignon, the nasty greengrocer. Mentally exhausted, Collignon no longer abuses his meek but good-natured assistant Lucien. A delighted Lucien takes charge at the grocery stand.

Mr. Dufayel, having observed Amélie, begins a conversation with her about his painting. Although he has copied the same painting 20 times, he has never quite captured the look of the girl drinking a glass of water. They discuss the meaning of this character, and over several conversations, Amélie begins projecting her loneliness onto the image. Dufayel recognizes this and uses the girl in the painting to push Amélie to examine her attraction to a quirky young man, Nino Quincampoix, who collects the discarded photographs of strangers from passport photo booths. When Amélie bumps into Nino a second time, she realizes she is falling in love with him. He accidentally drops a photo album in the street. Amélie retrieves it.

Amélie plays a cat-and-mouse game with Nino around Paris before returning his treasured album anonymously. After arranging a meeting at the 2 Moulins, Amélie panics and tries to deny her identity. Her co-worker, Gina, concerned for Amélie's well-being, screens Nino for her; Joseph's comment about this misleads Amélie to believe she has lost Nino to Gina. It takes Dufayel's insight to give her the courage to pursue Nino, resulting in a romantic night together and the beginning of a relationship. The film ends as Amélie experiences a moment of happiness she has found for herself.

Production

In his DVD commentary, Jeunet explains that he originally wrote the role of Amélie for the English actress Emily Watson. In that first draft, Amélie's father was an Englishman living in London. However, Watson's French was not strong, and when she became unavailable to shoot the film, owing to a conflict with the filming of Gosford Park, Jeunet rewrote the screenplay for a French actress. Audrey Tautou was the first actress he auditioned having seen her on the poster for the 1999 film Venus Beauty Institute.

Filming took place from March 2 to July 7, 2000 mainly in Paris. The Café des 2 Moulins (15 Rue Lepic, Montmartre, Paris) where Amélie works is a real place.

The filmmakers made use of computer-generated imagery (including computer animation), and a digital intermediate. The studio scenes were filmed in the Coloneum Studio in Cologne (Germany). The film shares many of the themes in its plot with the second half of the 1994 film Chungking Express.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The film was released in France, Belgium, and French-speaking western Switzerland in April 2001, with subsequent screenings at various film festivals followed by releases around the world. It received limited releases in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australasia later in 2001.

Cannes Film Festival selector Gilles Jacob described Amélie as "uninteresting", and therefore it was not screened at the festival, although the version he viewed was an early cut without music. The absence of Amélie at the festival caused something of a controversy because of the warm welcome by the French media and audience in contrast with the reaction of the selector. David Martin-Jones, in an article in Senses of Cinema, stated that the film "wears its national French identity on its sleeve" and that this attracted both audiences of mainstream movies and those of arthouse ones.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an 89% approval rating based on 186 reviews, with an average rating of 8.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The feel-good Amélie is a lively, fanciful charmer, showcasing Audrey Tautou as its delightful heroine." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 69 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".

Alan Morrison from Empire Online gave Amélie five stars and called it "one of the year's best, with crossover potential along the lines of Cyrano de Bergerac and Il Postino. Given its quirky heart, it might well surpass them all". Paul Tatara of CNN praised Amélie's playful nature. In his review, he wrote, "Its whimsical, free-ranging nature is often enchanting; the first hour, in particular, is brimming with amiable, sardonic laughs".

The film was attacked by critic Serge Kaganski of Les Inrockuptibles for an unrealistic and picturesque vision of a bygone French society with few ethnic minorities. Jeunet dismissed the criticism by pointing out that the photo collection contains pictures of people from numerous ethnic backgrounds, and that Jamel Debbouze, who plays Lucien, is of Moroccan descent.

The film opened on 432 screens in France and grossed 43.2 million French Franc ($6.2 million) in its opening week, placing it at number one.[18] It stayed in the top 10 for 22 weeks. It was the highest-grossing film in France for the year with a gross of $41 million.

Budget $10 million

Box office $174.2 million

My Review

To the viewers who complained about the movie depicting a totally unrealistic non-multiracial Paris, I wanna reply with a big and long : "Soooooo what ?" and here starts the review.

First, it's called ART. Which means it's something personal. A personal view from Jeunet which -I agree- has a very nostalgic 40's/50's feeling depiction of Paris with a sentimental focus on Montmartre, but again, why not? Why do you feel obliged to kill the joy of many viewers all over the world by adding a political "re" to Jeunet's "vision", should Jeunet have artificially inserted some racial minorities in the background just to satisfy the PC supporters : "Hey look, I'm not racist!". Amelie is a piece of Art, and an artistic masterpiece. It may look fake or artificial or just weird, but for me it was just a dream-like realistic-fantasy world full of non stereotypical yet eccentric people like in Capra's movies.

Secondly, Amelie is UNIVERSALLY appealing. It deals with universal themes all of us can relate to : nostalgia, childhood, quest for love, family, meaning of life, there's a gallery of characters so rich that everyone can relate to the situations they live, their simple pleasures, the things they like, the things they don't.

Third point : it makes you feel so good. It's an incredible feel-good and poetic movie that doesn't have the typical depressing message some movies like to sell just because it became so cool to push people down. By the way, being a feel-good movie is not enough, Amelie works thanks to the innovative story, the director's creativity, the wit of the script, and the beautiful and enchanting cinematography, not to mention the score that fits the movie like a glove. There's no cliché in Amelie, it was something totally fresh and new for its time. (As a comparison, "Slumdog Millionaire" is a feel-good movie, but far lest subtle than "Amelie" especially with the forced Fairy Tale ending and all the celebration : money, love, dancing etc.)

Ironically, those critics came for the same country that produced the film, it's an unfortunate tendency to over-analyse things, to put them on a very rational and political level : the movie was highly praised, even by racial minorities. Why? for all the reasons mentioned before : an entertaining artistic and popular movie, with a stunning cinematography, a great script, and more than that : a movie with a HEART, incarnated by Audrey Tautou's illuminating smile. But some people feel obliged to show how smart they are and try to analyse movies like a 'journalist' just to point out some things as if we hadn't noticed them before. And you have some French elitists bashing one of the most popular French movies, one of the greatest achievements in movie's history and one of the best ambassadors of French Cinema all over the world.

At the time of this writing, this film is ranked on IMDb as the 31st greatest film ever made. This is a sad under-ranking. This film is not only the greatest movie ever made, it shouldn't have to compete with such films as the Lord of the Rings, which will be forgotten 10 years from now. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has painted a timeless classic for the modern era.

The acting is all wonderful, as the film has a comic element that is very French. I do not know if Americans could have made this. While watching the way the characters interact with each other, I was reminded of my younger days in college, reading Beaumarchais' "The Marriage of Figaro". French literature has a rich history of comic genius (from at least the days of Voltaire's "Candide" if not sooner) and this film translates that energy from page to screen. At the same time, there is a serious existentialist tilt to this: how do we, as insignificant people, affect the world? This point is accentuated more by the fact that Amelie stands alone in the world despite being surrounded by so many people -- much like the girl in Renoir's painting (more on this shortly).

Audrey Tautou is particularly charming, in an alluringly beautiful way, but also innocently childlike in her grace and style. While more Americans probably know her today as the woman from "The DaVinci Code", this will always remain her best film (be that a blessing or a curse). One cannot help but like the character of Amelie -- she quite simply is flawless in her imperfect humanity.

The directing? Amazing! Angles, lighting and most of all colors (every color is pushed to the max as if the whole universal was designed by Crayola) are used to make a surreal and inviting world, where even death seems welcome and fun. The few characters who die do not do so in a way that makes us upset or sad, although the timing and manner is most tragic. The greens are the most vibrant, I think... even permeating into the other colors. But rather than blur things with its leaking, it only makes them more fluid and lifelike.

And even the subplots are fascinating: Amelie toys with a prospective lover, sends a garden gnome on a trip around the world, searches for a mystery man in red shoes, defends a young imbecile, makes unsuspecting patrons fall in love and helps a sheltered painter find the vision of Renoir.

The painter (known as Raymond Dufayel or The Glass Man and played by Serge Merlin) is a crucial central character. He is somewhat of a Sisyphean being, trying over and over again to complete the same task without fully succeeding. But he is also a mentor like Socrates (encouraging the youth to stand up against society) and a surrogate father figure. While Amelie has a father, their relationship is very spartan and business-like; her real interaction comes from Dufayel who guides her in metaphors and allusions.

This film also manages to do something very difficult -- make the obscene benign. While the film does have a sexual element and some off-colour jokes (one pornographic and another about abortion), we never feel the film has an adult quality to it. Everything seems innocent and pure -- even in the middle of the adult toy store. That must be a very difficult thing to capture as I know of no other film which has done so.

I will lay my reputation on the line and say this is the most perfect film ever created by human hands. From beginning to end this film speaks a subtle truth, and shows us that everyone has good points and bad points, flaws and great attributes. I know of no other film that treats its characters as both epic and unbearably human. And this is why Amelie stands out.

Amelie is such an inspiring movie, that invites you to forget today's cynicism, and enjoy the personal vision of the director, of the most beautiful town in the world, providing universal insights about the meaning of life. Merci Jeunet for this cinematic treasure! 10/10

{The soundtrack to this film is gorgeous, especially these two}