![]() Among the details in the restraining order against this man is that he’d stalked a woman for two months, spied on her and tapped her phone, and “tricked her into boarding Caribbean-bound jets”. There’s quite literally not a hair out of place in Amélie – Audrey Tautou’s immaculate bob is the greatest achievement in French hairdressing since Anna Karina’s bangs in Vivre Sa Vie – but the cold order of the film should not be mistaken for swooning romanticism.Īmélie also recalls a classic Onion headline that predates it by two years: Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested. The medium was entering an era of extreme plasticity, where the world could be bended and refined down to the pixel, and engineered to achieve moments of pristine, storyboarded flawlessness. Yet 20 years later, Amélie does feel like an important shift in film-making style, a natural bookend to Moulin Rouge earlier in the year. That “strange feeling of absolute harmony” is the metronomic ticking that Jeunet manufactures here – satisfying perhaps, but in no way romantic. There’s a mechanical quality to the film that’s completely at odds with the spontaneity and surprise of authentic passion. It’s really a film about perfection, a fantasy about how a messy world can, through force of will and timing and deftness of touch, be harmonized down to the second. And Amélie is not really a film about altruism, either, given how much time she spends tormenting the nasty greengrocer (Urbain Cancelier) who abuses his sweet, simple-minded assistant (Jamel Debbouze). A surge of love, an urge to help mankind overcomes her.”Īmélie is not really a film about love, as much as its heroine does to manufacture it for others - and finally, winsomely, for herself. A soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. Although she loves him, can Amelie bring herself to meet him? In the photo album, there is also a mysterious man who keeps reappearing: taking his picture in photo booths all over Paris, only to throw them away.As she glides blissfully through the frame, the narrator says, “Amélie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. Amelie finds it, and devises complicated ways of returning it to him. Nino, a young man who Amelie fancies, collects discarded photos from photo booths, and sticks them in an album, which he loses. Amelie reads some letters from this man, "invents" a new letter by piecing together some of the old ones, and sends it to the neighbour, with a note saying it was lost for 30 years.)īut she doesn't do so well in making herself happy. (One example: her neighbour tells her a story about her late husband. She succeeds, making this man happy, and now sets out to make everybody she can happy, in subtle and amusing ways. She decides to find him, and give it back to him. On the day Princess Diana is killed in a car crash, she discovers a box hidden in her flat, containing some treasured objects that a young boy hid away in the 1950's. (The present) Now she is 23, and having left home, she is working in a cafe in Paris. ![]() When she was six, her mother suddenly died, leaving her with her indifferent father. (Flashback) As a child, Amelie lived a very sheltered life, didn't go to school, and had no friends.
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