by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001.
Starring Maurice Bénichou, Urbain Cancelier, Jamel Debbouze, Mathieu Kassovitz, Claire Maurier, Serge Merlin, Clotilde Mollet, Yolande Moreau, Isabelle Nanty, Artus de Penguern, Dominique Pinon, Michel Robin, Rufus, Audrey Tautou.
Rating: 10/10, 9/10.
I had trouble giving this movie a rating. The ten out of ten for entertainment was easy—it entertained me extraordinarily. But I’m not sure how good it is. I mean, it’s a brilliant film, but at first I wanted to give it another ten. But then I realised that I wanted to give it such a high score just because it spoke to me specifically so much. I’m not even sure if the nine I’ve given it is too high. But more about that later.
First, the plot. It’s all about a lonely girl named Amélie (the ridiculously adorable Tautou, who better be in more movies), who likes skimming stones and noticing things in movies that no one else does. One day she discovers, hidden in her apartment, a box full of childhood memorabilia and sets out to discover whose box it is and reunite him with it. By doing so, she discovers that she can change people’s lives, make them happy, by secretly doing kind or mischievous things for them. In the course of doing so, she comes across a man (the very very cute, in a French way, Kassovitz) who likes to take torn up, discarded pictures from photo booths and piece them together in a notebook. She hasn’t spoken to him, but when he dropped his notebook and didn’t notice, she picked it up. Looking through it, she falls in love with him and decides to set up various strategems to give him back the notebook and get to know him.
Of course, in a film like this, relating the story only tells a small portion of the wonder that is the film itself. I haven’t mentioned some of the other characters—the quirkily wonderful women she works with at the café Les Deux Moulins (Two Windmills—there’s a lot of windmill imagery in this fim, and interestingly, Amelie’s last name, Poulain, rhymes with the French word for windmill). Take Gina (Mollet), a waitress whose bitter ex-boyfriend Joseph (Pinon, who played the six clones in Jeunet’s City Of Lost Children) comes to the café every day and keeps a close watch on all of her actions, recording them in a tape recorder. And Georgette (Mollet), the hypochondriac tobacconist at the café whom Amélie tries to set up with Joseph. Or Amélie’s neighbor, the glass man (Rufus, who was also in City Of Lost Children), who copies Monet (I think?) paintings and keeps a video camera hooked up to his television, aimed at a clock on the street, so he’ll never have to wind his.
The film pays loving attention to small details. We are told exactly what interesting things were happening all over Paris at the exact moment Amélie was conceived. Among other wonderful things, we are told that the wind is lifting up the tablecloth on a table at an outdoor restaurant, making the glasses on top of it dance magically. When we are told that Amélie likes to notice things in movies that no one else does, we get a closeup on a kissing scene on a train in an old movie, and we see that there is a bug crawling on the window behind them, almost looking like it crawls into one of their mouths.
More than that, it is visually beautiful. Beautiful is an over-used word, and I take some responsibility for that myself, but here I mean it in its fullest, most meaningful sense. My mouth hung open for the great majority of the time I was watching, taking in the gorgeous sights of Amélie’s apartment—the oversaturated reds of the wall contrasting with the intense yellow of her clothing—or any of the scenes where she is skimming stones, or, for that matter, every other shot in the film. Jeunet (who, along with City Of Lost Children, also made Delicatessen and Alien Ressurection) has always been a primarily visual director, and this, even more than City, is his masterpiece.
But, to get back to what I started this review talking about, the main thing about the film that reached me was that it is my specific, personal soul, on screen. Amélie is EXACTLY the person I’ve wanted to be all my life and am afraid I’ll never be able to be. It’s hard to explain, but if you ever want an insight into me personally, then see Amélie. Even if you don’t care an ounce about me, well, for the love of god, see it anyway. But yeah, for that reason it was hard for me to know exactly how "good" a film this is. Whatever, it's incredible.
ps. The original French title of the film, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain (which translates, shockingly enough, to something along the lines of "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain"), is much much better, if you ask me. For one thing it rhymes, for another thing it’s bucketloads of fun to say, and for a third thing it really sounds to me like the title Amélie herself would have come up with.