“Amélie” is the story of young girl named Amélie (Flora Guiet). She had no friends, an “iceberg” father, Raphaël (Rufus) and a “neurotic” mother, Amandine (Lorella Cravotta) as she was growing up. As a refusal to this solitude, the able Amélie would use her outrageous imagination as an escape.
The adult Amélie (Audrey Tautou) would be no different. Now a waitress with and omnipresent immaculate appearance with incredible amounts of leisure time, living in a swank apartment with an adorable cat, Amélie copes through her existence by imagining the comings (“15” simultaneous orgasms) and goings of Parisian couples, her eclectic friends, families and foes.
One day she discovers something that would change her life from a daydreamer to a do-gooder for others before turning to self-interest for real companionship in her world of anxious aloneness.
Using a familiar cast from his other films; Jeunet has created another imaginary world where the playfulness of a child guides the film’s attitude. Jeunet like his fellow Frenchman, the late Franæois Truffaut, adores children but understands the limits of the worlds. However, whereas Truffaut (“400 Blows,” “Small Change,” and “The Wild Child”) was concerned with the brutal reality of adolescence in the adult oriented universe, Jeunet embraces the inner infantile fantasies to create a magical-realistic world on may find similar to the novels of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez; in particular, his tour-de-force “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
What bestows this film its colossal charm is the voluptuous, sumptuous eidetic camera work of Jeunet and cinematographer of Bruno Delbonnel. Films with this much detail and absolutely gorgeous images are exceedingly rare. From the scintillating scatological beginning to the aural joy of a café sex scene, the ubiquitous, who does not say, “he just killed a hippie,” gnome, to the--and I am not one to succumb to hyperbole--majestic video scenes of a horse running along a bike race, an old man with a peg-leg dancing in the dirt, to the breathtaking and spine-tingling underwater swim of infants between their parents.
In the broader picture of the film, you can tell Jeunet is in love with the screen presence of Tautou for which her visage remains unblemished to the point of obnoxiousness. Even when she is breaking into houses during her days of ease, Tautou always looks made up as if she was Jennifer Lopez in a film.
The film, shot before Sept. 11, is the literal counterpoint to the allegorical Stephen Frear’s film “Liam,” with regards to the coincidence of relating to the now household name nation of Afghanistan when Amélie imagines her amour fou, Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), in a series of outrageous events, resides on an Afghan mountain as an ul-Mujahedin member, talking to a goat. Many of the audience gasped during this scene; others laughed. I came like none of those dildos for sale in the film could.
Another apropos moment is when Amélie tells her unconcerned father she had an abortion and he does not listen. Now I know the French have long since disdained the intellectually immature abortion debate, but the father shows no reaction to his daughter out of self-absorption. Next Tuesday, in the intellectually underdeveloped United States, there will be much attention and even more tension as we mark the 29th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark case that made abortions legal, if not always affordable, to women in the country.
Outside of this last point, it is clear why “Amélie” has been such a success. It is shot brilliantly, with fancy and farcical elements shooting back and forth during the lifetime of a woman who lives and dreams alone but at least can afford the leisure of doing so. Whatever “Amélie” wants to do is achievable. She and the film have such good intentions one is willing to forgive her omnipotence.