Amélie is a young woman living on her own in Paris. When she is not working in a local café, she spends most of her time dreaming about the inconsequential… not knowing her vocation in life until she discovers a small box of childish treasures hidden in her flat. Returning these toys to their original owner becomes her mission, and, she decides that if the owner appreciates the reunion, she will make this type of intervention her hobby.
Amélie’s new career of improving other people’s lives in innocent and quiet ways gives her satisfaction, yet slowly she realises her own life is almost desperately lonely. Only when she spies a young man with a similarly odd hobby – collecting discarded passport photos – does she decide to discard her shyness and make her move. But she can only do it in her own idiom, which invariably involves the mysterious ringing of telephone booths, artfully placed passport photos, and some blue chalk arrows… this girl really ought to learn some chat-up lines.
Beautifully photographed, with music and scenery that must have set the Parisian tourist board rubbing their hands in glee, Amélie is an adorable and funny film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, as with his best-known previous film Delicatessen, enjoys digging up the idiosyncratic and the inconsequential. From wondering how many people are experiencing orgasm in Paris at any given moment, to sending her father’s garden gnome on holiday to pique her father into following his dreams of travel, Amélie’s mind works in ways which ignore the larger picture and concentrate on the smaller ways of gaining pleasure from life.
As for Audrey Tautou – never has the word ‘gamine’ been so appropriately used. Tautou is almost edible in this film, and dizzy males can be seen swooning out of cinema theatres muttering ‘…lips’. Don’t let the whole foreign film thing put you off renting this - it’s simply not the kind of thing that America seems capable of producing at present. Certainly it’s not going to attract those who only go for Fast and the Furious type mammoths, but it’s neither exclusively a chick flick nor a frothy piece of arty French stuff. It’s a lot more substantial than both, and works both as a damn good comedy film and as a reminder of that old cliché: It’s the simple things in life that give the most happiness. |
