I like to look for things no-one else catches ✵ Amélie - SMALL WORLD ✵ 1992–PRESENT - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Romantic comedy

DIRECTOR

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

WRITERS

Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

STARS

Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Dominique Pinon

BEFORE

1991 Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen is an inventive fantasy movie set in a postapocalyptic France.

1995 The baroque fairy tale The City of Lost Children gets Jeunet noticed by Hollywood.

AFTER

2004 Jeunet teams up with Tautou for the war drama A Very Long Engagement.

2009 Micmacs is a comedy-satire by Jeunet about the arms industry.

After enjoying critical success in France, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first venture into Hollywood was a troubled one. Hired to direct the fourth movie in the science-fiction Alien series, the project suffered production difficulties and was released to mixed reviews. Jeunet returned to France discouraged, and for his next movie concocted Amélie, a work in which every frame seems to celebrate a freedom that had perhaps been denied to him on his previous project. Structurally, Amélie is a romantic comedy—the story of a waitress meeting the man she’s destined to fall in love with; in practice the movie is a tribute to a virtuoso creativity and imagination. Despite the smallness of the central story, Jeunet uses techniques usually reserved for action movies and epics. The far-reaching and expansive script, the strong use of color, and the experimental editing techniques all serve as platforms for the director’s skill without losing touch with an intimate story: that of a young woman finding herself.

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In Amélie, Jeunet succeeded in finding a new take on the tired and much-derided romantic comedy genre, using an ambitious pairing of style and subject matter.

Saying without words

Amélie has a very pronounced visual showmanship, which underscores one of the movie’s key themes—that the most valuable communication is done without words. Its central protagonist, the young waitress Amélie, is so shy that she plots elaborate ways to convey things she is incapable of putting into words. For example, instead of confronting a shop owner she sees abusing his employee, she subtly disrupts the owner’s daily routine to the point where he doubts his own sanity, such as by swapping around door handles in his apartment and changing the alarm time on his bedside clock. By the same token, when she tries to reignite her father’s dream of seeing the world, she does so by “kidnapping” his garden gnome and sending her father photos of it appearing in several exotic locations. These are disparate goals. One is an act of social vigilantism, the other a familial gesture of love. Yet Amélie goes about both in the same way, manipulating reality to get the person to the place she wants them—not out of malice, but because she sees the world in a different way. She notices things other people don’t and acts in a way other people would not. This is especially so when Amélie finds herself face to face with her love interest, Nino. There is no speech of any kind. They simply look at each other, seeing into the person honestly, and realize they are meant for each other.

Though some criticized Amélie for what was seen as a dated portrait of Paris, others fell in love with the way it merges ambition with soulfulness, juxtaposing high-energy visuals and narrative adventure with the simple story of a boy and a girl falling in love.

She doesn’t relate to people, she was always a lonely child.”

Amélie / Amélie

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Amélie (Audrey Tautou) plays jokes on the bullying grocery-store owner (Urbain Cancelier) for his cruelty to Lucien (Jamel Debbouze). She secretly falls for Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz, far left).

JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET Director

Jean-Pierre Jeunet was born in the Loire region, France, in 1953. He bought his first movie camera at 17 when he studied animation at Cinémation studios. His first feature movie was Delicatessen, which he codirected with Marc Caro. Based on the commercial and critical success of their follow-up, The City of Lost Children, Jeunet was offered Alien: Resurrection. After it performed poorly, he returned to France and directed Amélie, his most celebrated movie.

Key movies

1991 Delicatessen

1995 The City of Lost Children

2001 Amélie

What else to watch: Funny Face (1957) ✵ The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) ✵ Delicatessen (1991) ✵ The City of Lost Children (1995) ✵ Alien: Resurrection (1997) ✵ A Very Long Engagement (2004)