Amelie

"That's not love, it's just rubbish!" -Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

Let's get this straight, from the off: Amelie is not going to change the mind of cynics. Lonely and embittered singletons are not going to have their dark Valentine's nights redeemed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet's whimsical, fantastical romantic comedy; Ebenezer Scrooge's career in misanthropy would not have been curtailed by one hundred and eleven minutes with only a DVD player and his thoughts. Amelie begs of its -and her- audience a great deal of innate sympathy and suspension of disbelief, like a fantasy novel whose opening page is a map with place-names in Dwarven runes; the reader either buys into the author's world, or rolls his eyes and says "Yeah, RIGHT." Let it be noted, therefore, that people who like this sort of thing will find this to be very much the sort of thing they like- people who ask nothing more of a movie than a romantic interest, some gentle comedy and a happy ending will love Amelie. They need read no further. Leave us, friends; we have BIG PEOPLE things to talk about.

Amelie is a classic love affair between camera and heroine. The entire movie is a flagrantly manipulative episode of Amelie-worship, an attempt to prod and push us into loving its heroine so much that our interest in the film is sustained more or less exclusively by our interest in her. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Jeunet's exploitation of our feelings about his Amelie is comparatively gentle, certainly nowhere near as cynical as those of his blockbuster Hollywood counterparts; rather than producing a heroine who is simply a generic collection of 'nice' qualities we simply can't NOT like, Jeunet is at pains to make his central character a lovable eccentric, an individual, a construction of whimsy, idiosyncracy and vivacity we actively delight in. The whole project rests on his success in this. Give us a loveable Amelie, and we will gladly watch her darning socks for two hours; give us a boring Amelie, and all the intricacies of storyline and plot in the world will not stave off our clock-watching sighs. But the problem is, of course, that Jeunet gives us neither.

An interesting central character, we can revel in. An uninteresting central character, we can grow accustomed to and accept. But Jeunet's exposition of Amelie is frustratingly promising, replete with touches, hinting at possibilities that are never fully realised. Jeunet is never completely dedicated to Amelie as character- he treats us to five or ten minute diversions and expositions which just about work, then reverts to using her as a simple plot device in a plot which is actually fairly bland and tedious, relying on Audrey Toutou's mischievous grins and sylph-like charms to carry the character through to the next protagonist-promoting pitstop. This she does, to the satisfaction of the sizable percentage of the audience who need know no more than that she looks cutesy-poo and does cutesy-poo things, but, to the rest of us, the divisions between the sections of audience-appeasing character exposition and the sections of contrived, tail-chasing storyline are so clear as to be practically inked onto the frames.

Amelie and Jeunet ultimately lack the courage of their convictions. Rather than continue to develop and augment his central character in the auspicious manner he does in the movie's opening ten minutes or so, Jeunet continually bows to the need to satisfy his more fidgety viewers with the addition of yet another uniform link to the infinitely self-replicating chain that passes for his plot. Amelie has enough ambition, invention and originality to easily propel it into the top rank of romantic comedies; but if that is the scope of Jeunet's ambition, then I do not expect the scope of his achievement will ever much surpass it.