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Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) Though it refers to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's earlier films (with a minor reprise of the rhythmic offscreen sex scene of Delicatessen), this Marc Caro-free project is a lighter, sweetly fantastical tale. It's set in real Paris at a real time (August 1997) but evokes early talkie visions like L'Atalante or Sous les tois de Paris, brought up to date with unostentatious CGI, gadgetry (VCRs, polaroid cameras, photo-booths) and the addition of a sex shop to such typical Parisian locales as a café-tabac, an apartment block complete with concierge, and a grocery stall and a funfair. Heavily narrated (by Andre Dussolier), with footnotes and explanations that take a strange course of their own, it's the story of Amélie (Audrey Tautou), daughter of a remote doctor father (Rufus) and a neurotic mother, who grows up with a tendency to daydream, a rigid sense of justice and a habit of keeping herself apart from the world. She has tried boyfriends but currently prefers dipping her hands in wheat and breaking the surface of crème brulee with a spoon. Startled by the news of Princess Diana's death, Amélie drops a bottle-stopper and dislodges a tile in her apartment wall, behind which she finds a tin box full of boy's treasures from the 1950s (chains of events recur in Jeunet movies). She sets out to find the grown-up boy and return his box, resolving to become a do-gooder if he's affected by the 'miracle': the results are skewed but moving, as the treasures bring back not just nostalgia but also the pain of childhood (a day when the boy won but then lost all the marbles) and the middle-aged man (Maurice Benichou) resolves to see his estranged daughter and enter his grandson's life. Thereafter, Amélie brings together a jealous patron (Dominique Pinon) of the café where she works and the hypochondriac (Isabelle Nanty) who runs the tabac counter (though their relationship isn't easy), kidnaps a garden gnome from her mother's shrine and entrusts it to an air hostess who takes it round the world sending Amélie's father polaroids of it at international landmarks before returning it to its proud place, lightly persecutes the grocer (Urbain Cancellier) who ridicules his slightly slow-witted Di-worshipping assistant (Jamel Debbouze), tapes odd and amusing bits off television for a brittle-boned artist (Serge Merlin) who can't get out and fakes a last letter of love from a dead, runaway husband to the concierge (Yolande Moreau) who remains hung up on his long-ago betrayal. Amélie, with her Louise Brooks hairdo and gamine face, is a
pixie-ish creature, seen as a child with CGI cloud animals and imaginary
beasts, turning to a watery cascade when she thinks she has been rejected.
Audrey Tatou makes Amélie as strange as she is endearing, showing
that her good deeds come out of neurosis as much as saintliness and
don't all turn out well. Merlin, another Mr Glass, tells her she needs
to engage in life for herself, and she intermittently pursues Nino Quicampoix
(Mathieu Kassovitz), a young man of similarly strange interests (he
has an album of rejected photographs scavenged from photo-booths) who
works in a sex shop and on a ghost train. She solves a mystery that
perplexes him about a phantom figure who leaves photographs around the
city (the friendly booth repairman) and leads him through a teasing
treasure-hunt to return his lost album, a game she extends to the point
of almost losing her chance with him – though there's clearly
a happy ending on the cards. Jeunet's Paris is an imaginary place, though
more of the real leaks in than it did in The City of Lost Children
or Delicatessen, and the amber-tinted look
of the film reflects this. His heroine is almost like the optimistic
upside of the martyrs of Lars Von Trier's films (in fact, the lead role
was written for Emily Watson of Breaking the Waves).
It's a fragile confection, liable to irritate some, but it casts a real
enchantment, and Tautou's Amélie is Gelsomina for the 2000s. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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