Amélie is a 2001 French-language romantic comedy directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and it wants nothing more than to make you happy. Audrey Tautou plays Amélie Poulain, a shy waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre who decides to rearrange the lives of everyone around her. The film was a major commercial success, grossing $174.2 million worldwide against a budget of $10 million. It is one of the biggest international successes for a French film. It is also, at 122 minutes, a machine that runs on charm — and charm, unlike wit, does not hold up under weight.
Trailer, via Miramax.
The Perfume-Stopper and the Box
The plot turns on a small accident. On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Amélie drops a plastic perfume-stopper. It dislodges a wall tile and reveals an old metal box of childhood memorabilia, hidden decades earlier by a boy who lived in her apartment. She sets out to find him and return it.
She promises herself that if it makes him happy, she will devote her life to bringing happiness to others. That vow is the engine of the whole film, and it is a good one — a character deciding to be kind is more interesting than a character deciding to be in love.
The search leads her to her reclusive neighbour, Raymond Dufayel, an artist with brittle bone disease who replicates Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party every year. He gives her the name she needs: “Bretodeau.” Amélie finds the man, Dominique Bretodeau, and surreptitiously gives him the box. He is moved to tears.
A Cast of Eccentrics
Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant wrote the screenplay together, and the film won two British Academy Film Awards, including Best Original Screenplay. That award is deserved in the sense that the script is dense and controlled: it plants a dozen small mechanisms and pays every one of them off.
The ensemble does the rest. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Nino Quincampoix, the handsome stranger Amélie bumps into. Rufus plays her withdrawn father, Raphaël Poulain. Serge Merlin is Dufayel. Jamel Debbouze is Lucien; Clotilde Mollet is Gina; Claire Maurier is Suzanne; Isabelle Nanty is Georgette; Dominique Pinon is Joseph. Yolande Moreau, Urbain Cancelier and Artus de Penguern fill out the café.
What Montmartre Costs
Here is the problem with Amélie, and it is not a small one. Amélie’s childhood is genuinely grim. She is born in 1974 and raised by eccentric parents who wrongly believe she has a heart defect and homeschool her. When she is six, her mother, Amandine, is killed by a suicidal Canadian tourist who jumps from the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris and lands on her. Her father withdraws further from society. Amélie leaves home at 18.
That is not whimsy. That is a case study. The film knows this and then spends the rest of its runtime insisting that Amélie’s loneliness is adorable — that dipping a hand into grain sacks, cracking crème brûlée with a spoon and skipping stones along the Canal Saint-Martin are sufficient answers to it.
She’ll change your life.
The tagline is a promise the film cannot keep, because it confuses a personality with a cure. Amélie’s isolation does not get resolved by the plot; it gets decorated by it.
The Score and the Surface
The film received widespread critical acclaim, with praise for Tautou’s performance, the cinematography, visuals, production design, sound design, editing, musical score, writing and Jeunet’s direction. It won Best Film at the European Film Awards and four César Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay.
Every one of those craft categories is a legitimate win. The sound design is doing real work. The editing has a comic rhythm that most comedies never find. Tautou is the reason the film survives its own sweetness — she plays shyness as an active, watchful state rather than a blank one.
Amélie is a beautiful object. It was released in France on 25 April 2001 by UGC-Fox Distribution and in Germany on 16 August 2001 by Prokino Filmverleih.
What Actually Holds
The Bretodeau sequence is the film’s best argument for itself. A man opens a box, remembers who he was, and decides to reconcile with the people he left behind. That is a complete story in eight minutes.
The Nino plot is thinner. The film builds toward a courtship without giving it the same weight it gives the box, and the imbalance shows.
So the verdict is mixed, and it should be stated plainly: Amélie is a gorgeous, inventive, genuinely funny film that mistakes its own charm for depth. It earned its $174.2 million. It did not earn the tagline. 6.9/10.
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