The Big Picture: Amelie (15)

Anthony Quinn
Friday 05 October 2001 00:00 BST
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

The clue is in the name. Amélie – a Latin derivation meaning "to make better", as in "ameliorate" – is the story of a young woman who decides to spread a little happiness about her. On the day of Princess Diana's death in August 1997, Amélie Poulain assumes the role of Montmartre's very own Queen of Hearts, and begins a secret mission to change lives for the better. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movie is basically a fairytale gussied up for adults (sudden, frantic jolts of sex ensure its "15" certificate) and ordinarily could be teamed with Chocolat on a future double bill entitled Grotesquerie Sentimentale, or some such. Their sweet tooth for schmaltz is well-matched.

But there's a major difference. Amélie has done phenomenal business in its native France; to wit, it's the most successful movie ever made there. What's going on? How did anyone flip for this slice of Gallic whimsy? That it could be anything to do with the storyline seems incredible. Shy, adorable Amélie (Audrey Tautou) is raised by strange parents, "a neurotic and an iceberg", yet manages to survive her upbringing with sanity intact. Now a young woman, she discovers hidden in her apartment a little tin box containing a child's forgotten treasure. When she returns this trove to its owner, now in his middle-age, she is moved to find him tearful with gratitude and determined to change his life.

Sensing that altruism is her vocation, this fairy-made-flesh roams Paris in search of good causes. She finds them, too, in her picture-book neighbourhood; a grocer who regularly humiliates his gentle assistant is taught a lesson in humanity via Amélie's stealthy sabotage of the bully's apartment. At the café where she waitresses, Amélie plays matchmaker to a hypochondriac colleague and a romantically embittered customer (Dominique Pinon, once the truculent skinhead from Diva, and still unmistakable), their passion consummated in the café loo with the same fixture-rumbling, ground-shivering dynamic that Jeunet made his signature 10 years ago in Delicatessen. His liking for the outlandish seeks similar expression here, suddenly cutting away to an antic image of dislocation, like an outburst of tears that turns into a mini-deluge, or the portraits on a wall that spring to life, or the square quartet of passport photos that start up a conversation amongst themselves. Portraiture is the film's leitmotif; it surfaces first in the painting of Amélie's infirm neighbour, who painstakingly reproduces a Renoir, and later, significantly, in an album of discarded photo-booth portraits.

Amélie is itself rather beautiful to look at, shot by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel in a glazed, buttery light whose novelty hasn't been completely exhausted (yet) by commercials directors. Interiors glow with fairytale hues, like the ruby-reds of Amélie's bedroom and the day-glo greens of a métro subway. There have been complaints among French critics that the one area on which colour doesn't impinge is skin – this is a white-bread Paris, unrecognisably empty of the city's multiracial faces. True enough, but this would be to assume that the film has some truck with realism; it doesn't, unless you wish to count magic realism. This is Paris seen through a glass lightly, tricked out with all kinds of distortions – undercranking the camera, superimposition, back-projections – and peopled with characters who have all the moral substance of a Teletubby.

Still unable to divine the secret of the film's appeal, one turns at last to its star, and here we may be on to something. Audrey Tautou, with her gamine fragility and sweet diffidence, inevitably brings to mind the other Audrey, and will make audiences swoon with one glance of those imploring, little-girl-lost eyes. With the slightly wonky fringe of her dark pageboy haircut, her long old-fashioned skirts and clumpy shoes, her Amélie has a coy and somewhat sexless charm. We are also meant to go "aaah" on learning what she loves – breaking the crust on a crème brûlée with a spoon, plunging her hand into a sack of grain, skimming stones on the Canal St Martin: these are a few of her favourite things. Tautou is very easy on the eye, though my patience with her and the film began to crack once she fixes her sights on Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), whose part-time employment in a porno shop will supposedly not blind us to the fact that he, too, is one of nature's innocents. Amélie wants to return the photo album Nino lost on the street, but rather than let her just do so Jeunet contrives a preposterous and super-annoying paperchase whereby Nino is guided by little messages towards his romantic destiny.

If, plotwise, this is the climax-delaying trick played by Sleepless in Seattle, then emotionally we're back in the never-never land of Chocolat, or, since we're talking confectionery, humbug. It's not just that it trowels on the sentimentality, either – would that it were. Indeed, cinema's most conspicuous failures – of taste, imagination, intelligence – I can usually meet with a Zen-like degree of calm, but there is still one blight that never fails to set my teeth on edge, and that is winsomeness. And Amélie has it in spades. Like the wannabe wildman who insists "I'm mad, I am", this film says, in almost every mooncalf stare and whimsical sally, "I'm cute, I am." It is so ingratiating as to be almost repulsive.

By the end even Tautou's unassuming presence has become slightly maddening. Why this infantilist tripe should have stormed the French box office is a mystery, though one can be certain its promoters hope for it do the same over here. You have been warned.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in