AMÉLIE (2001)  ***

Reviewed 11/3/01

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE or the full French title, THE FABULOUS DESTINY OF AMÉLIE POULAIN, has been to France this year what TITANIC was to this country a few years ago, both financially and culturally.   Jeunet’s sensibility may be a cross between Terry Gilliam and the Coen brothers, but his subject here, a nostalgic golden Paris that never really existed, is uniquely French.  The film’s infectious joie de vivre however will appeal to the French and non-French alike.

Jeunet first came to international attention in 1991 co-directing DELICATESSEN with sometime partner Marc Caro.  The film delineated Jeunet’s quirky visual sense, colorful storytelling, and most spectacularly, his vivid imagination.  He and Caro followed DELICATESSEN with the likable but less satisfying CITY OF LOST CHILDREN.  It suffered from its makers trying to stuff too much into the movie until it started collapsing under its own weight.  These qualities, the good and the bad, follow Jeunet’s work into AMÉLIE.

Written by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant, the movie introduces us to Amélie (Audrey Tautou), her parents, and other characters by revealing their likes and dislikes.  Amélie’s father, for example, likes to clean out his tool box but hates urinating beside men he detests.  Amélie’s mother died while Amélie was young during a freak suicide.  To be clear, this was not her mother’s suicide, but someone else’s – a woman jumped from the top of a cathedral and landed on Amélie’s mother.  In 1997, Amélie is a perky if quiet waitress at the café, The Twin Windmills.  On the day of Princess Diana’s death, Amélie finds a collection of odd items dating back to the 1950s behind a tile in her bathroom.  She hunts down the person who lived in her apartment then and returns the items anonymously.  The old man who had hid the now nostalgic possessions as a child is touched and Amélie in return is delighted.  The episode inspires her to act as a kind of fairy godmother to her neighborhood.   She tries to set up two lonely souls (Dominique Pinon and Isabelle Nanty), help a painter (Serge Merlin) who has fragile bones, and plays a gag on her father (Rufus Narcy) by having his garden gnome mysteriously disappear and then send postcards while traveling the world.  Amélie punishes as well as rewards.  Retaliating against a grocer (Urbain Cancelier) who tortures his obtuse employee (Jamel Debbouze), Amélie tinkers with his apartment resulting in surreal chaos.

During this first half of AMÉLIE, Jeunet sustains the playfulness with eccentric charm, but as the second half turns to introverted Amélie dealing with the possibility of romance with Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a man who collects discarded pictures from photo booths, the horsing around becomes an over-extended muddle.  The romantic arc is so slight that its emotional consequences threaten to waft away altogether.  Tautou comes off like a mischievous Audrey Hepburn, and if Amélie is no more than a sprite with an alluring smirk, that is due more to the writing than Tautou’s expressiveness.  Ultimately, the movie is pure fluff, but it is fluff well-nourished with a wealth of comic detail and great cinematic craft and energy.