Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writers: Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Photography: Bruno Delbonnel
Music: Yann Tiersen
Editor: Hervé Schneid
Cast: Audrey Tautou, André Dussollier, Rufus, Mathieu Kassovitz, Maurice Bénichou, Urbain Cancelier, Artus de Penguern, Dominique Pinon, Isabel Nanty, Serge Merlin, Lorella Cravotta, Claire Maurier
The title character in Amélie is a humble young Parisian woman who works as a waitress. She is played in warm style by Audrey Tautou. Amélie is shy and introverted. She lost her mother in a somewhat comical episode when she was still a child. Now her father is remote and preoccupied with his hobbies. In the busy opening, the picture races through introductions to many of its many characters, with a voiceover narrator (André Dussollier) offering a litany of things they like and don’t like. We learn, for example, that one character’s cat “likes overhearing children’s stories.” Amélie likes watching old movies and noticing details no one else sees (there’s an example from Jules and Jim), but she hates when people driving in these pictures don’t keep an eye on the road (that’s an older Hollywood picture with Spencer Tracy). Amélie is a romantic with little interest in sex. “Instead,” Dussollier tells us, “she cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Dipping her hand into sacks of grain [at the market], cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon [accompanied by some very satisfying ASMR], and skipping stones at Canal Saint-Martin.”
Amélie finds her calling when she discovers a box of keepsakes kept by a boy and hidden years before in the wall of her apartment. She sets out to find the owner and return it to him. It takes some effort and detective work (and more charming characters along the way) but she finally manages it, in a strangely elaborate manner that is quite moving for the recipient. At that point, Amélie starts pursuing many more of these elaborate pranks which would be so hard to pull off in any other setting except a light-hearted romantic comedy movie. Fortunately, that’s basically what we have here, and not a bad one.
Cast: Audrey Tautou, André Dussollier, Rufus, Mathieu Kassovitz, Maurice Bénichou, Urbain Cancelier, Artus de Penguern, Dominique Pinon, Isabel Nanty, Serge Merlin, Lorella Cravotta, Claire Maurier
The title character in Amélie is a humble young Parisian woman who works as a waitress. She is played in warm style by Audrey Tautou. Amélie is shy and introverted. She lost her mother in a somewhat comical episode when she was still a child. Now her father is remote and preoccupied with his hobbies. In the busy opening, the picture races through introductions to many of its many characters, with a voiceover narrator (André Dussollier) offering a litany of things they like and don’t like. We learn, for example, that one character’s cat “likes overhearing children’s stories.” Amélie likes watching old movies and noticing details no one else sees (there’s an example from Jules and Jim), but she hates when people driving in these pictures don’t keep an eye on the road (that’s an older Hollywood picture with Spencer Tracy). Amélie is a romantic with little interest in sex. “Instead,” Dussollier tells us, “she cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Dipping her hand into sacks of grain [at the market], cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon [accompanied by some very satisfying ASMR], and skipping stones at Canal Saint-Martin.”
Amélie finds her calling when she discovers a box of keepsakes kept by a boy and hidden years before in the wall of her apartment. She sets out to find the owner and return it to him. It takes some effort and detective work (and more charming characters along the way) but she finally manages it, in a strangely elaborate manner that is quite moving for the recipient. At that point, Amélie starts pursuing many more of these elaborate pranks which would be so hard to pull off in any other setting except a light-hearted romantic comedy movie. Fortunately, that’s basically what we have here, and not a bad one.
Not everything Amélie does is exactly “good.” She breaks into the apartment of an unpleasant merchant, for example, and does things like switching a tube of foot cream in place of the toothpaste, resetting the alarm clock, jimmying with the electrical wires, etc. Busy, busy. But usually she is doing nice things. This surreptitious behavior of hers is explained in part, and more or less formally, as a case of extreme introversion. I’ll take that explanation, and I can go along with the usual request in these things for suspension of disbelief—at least for a while. It may take a little too long and too circuitous of a path for her to reach the happy resolution required by the rules of rom-com.
It could be shorter, say 90 minutes instead of two hours. That’s more like the right length for light-hearted romantic comedies. With rom-com as the basic shape of his movie, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet offers up an artful and energetic blast of sensation, full of quick cuts and crazy camera angles and with a color palette that often makes it feel like a Fisher-Price toy—a good thing, in this case. When we get a look at Amélie’s bedroom, with its insane red wallpaper patterns, it has the feel of another French picture, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Amélie can be boldly childishly playful like puppies and kittens rolling all over themselves. As a narrative it wants to tell us everything at once, sending spikes shooting out in all directions, establishing a rhythm like music. When the man finds the box of keepsakes, for example, his head is instantly full of tumbling memories that fight for our attention and almost go by too fast, delivering emotional depth charges: a dreamlike bicycle race led by a joyful horse, a specific school day when he won all the marbles but was punished for it. It’s an electric charge of memory suddenly restored by physical, tactile sensation.
Still, for all its manifest skill at most levels of the filmmaking, Amélie could be shorter. It gives us a little too much time to think about its fantastic things. And, by noticeably overstaying the welcome, Amélie the character can start to look a little deranged and pathological with her stunts—or, worse, unsympathetically pathetic. She has a love interest, but it’s convoluted and more cerebral, based on mutual interests in found photos and the ways of fate. They are compatible and suitably destined for one another, but the actual getting there is tortuous.
For all its inventive qualities, it’s tempting to compare Jeunet’s work here to Jacques Tati or even Jean-Luc Godard. Maybe that’s just me being confused about the French of it. I have also somehow missed Jeunet’s 1991 Delicatessen as well as the rest of his pictures. Amélie has the playfulness and energy of Tati and Godard and it has the feel of a story that is taking a fling at the whims of random destiny. But at one point, in the last 30 minutes, it started to feel dangerously trite. Amélie is making everyone else happy but she can’t make herself happy. That is not the way the movie starts at all, practically declaring from the start no sadness no nostalgia, nor is it the way it ends. Maybe it should have been cut out. Amélie the movie has a lot to recommend it but it can also feel somewhat manufactured.
It could be shorter, say 90 minutes instead of two hours. That’s more like the right length for light-hearted romantic comedies. With rom-com as the basic shape of his movie, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet offers up an artful and energetic blast of sensation, full of quick cuts and crazy camera angles and with a color palette that often makes it feel like a Fisher-Price toy—a good thing, in this case. When we get a look at Amélie’s bedroom, with its insane red wallpaper patterns, it has the feel of another French picture, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Amélie can be boldly childishly playful like puppies and kittens rolling all over themselves. As a narrative it wants to tell us everything at once, sending spikes shooting out in all directions, establishing a rhythm like music. When the man finds the box of keepsakes, for example, his head is instantly full of tumbling memories that fight for our attention and almost go by too fast, delivering emotional depth charges: a dreamlike bicycle race led by a joyful horse, a specific school day when he won all the marbles but was punished for it. It’s an electric charge of memory suddenly restored by physical, tactile sensation.
Still, for all its manifest skill at most levels of the filmmaking, Amélie could be shorter. It gives us a little too much time to think about its fantastic things. And, by noticeably overstaying the welcome, Amélie the character can start to look a little deranged and pathological with her stunts—or, worse, unsympathetically pathetic. She has a love interest, but it’s convoluted and more cerebral, based on mutual interests in found photos and the ways of fate. They are compatible and suitably destined for one another, but the actual getting there is tortuous.
For all its inventive qualities, it’s tempting to compare Jeunet’s work here to Jacques Tati or even Jean-Luc Godard. Maybe that’s just me being confused about the French of it. I have also somehow missed Jeunet’s 1991 Delicatessen as well as the rest of his pictures. Amélie has the playfulness and energy of Tati and Godard and it has the feel of a story that is taking a fling at the whims of random destiny. But at one point, in the last 30 minutes, it started to feel dangerously trite. Amélie is making everyone else happy but she can’t make herself happy. That is not the way the movie starts at all, practically declaring from the start no sadness no nostalgia, nor is it the way it ends. Maybe it should have been cut out. Amélie the movie has a lot to recommend it but it can also feel somewhat manufactured.
No comments:
Post a Comment