Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie is one of those once-in-a-decade comedies which scatters its charm like pearls from a broken necklace, all the more adorable because they are not real. The first big surprise is that it is directed by Jeunet, the moody, intense force behind Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, and Alien Resurrection. The second is that it has proved so popular and controversial in Jeunet’s native France that Jacques Chirac himself has been puzzling over its message, trying to work out how it relates to ordinary people.
To put this into perspective, this is a bit like picturing Margaret Thatcher, at the height of her power, settling down with a nice cup of tea and a notebook in front of Gregory’s Girl. Now there was another gentle, quirky, seemingly carefree but spiritually invigorating film that, just like Amelie, proved that you simply can’t bullet-point the human spirit.
Amelie herself is played by Audrey Tautou, an enchanting actress who should think about contacting her American acting sisters, Mia Farrow and Winona Ryder, for advice about how to cope with an entire career where she is described as “gamine” in every review. Gamine Tautou undoubtedly is in Amelie, but she is also clever, stylish, naughty, minxish and, most of the time, sensually comforting and unthreatening to men and women alike. In some shots she is so lovely that you want to ban your boyfriend from seeing her, just like once you planned to burn all copies of Beatrice Dalle in Betty Blue because you knew you could never match up.
However, where Betty was wild, mad as a duck and doomed, a true French cinema heroine, Amelie is wild, mad as a duck and full of guileless joy. More than any other cinema icon, she reminds me of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka in his chocolate factory, another adult innocent whose only desire was to see people happy.
Amelie tries to achieve this by seeing to it that those around her are shown their own capacity for joy. These include her uptight father; a hypochondriac shop assistant; a painter with bones as brittle as glass; a young grocer who is teased for his obsession with the beauty of vegetables, and a customer at the cafe in which Amelie works who can’t stop himself foaming up like a human cappuccino with sexual jealousy at every turn.
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But there are many more -the only real criticism of Amelie is that there are far too many characters for the viewer to engage with. What elevates Amelie is the sure editing, the bubbling spring of farce and lunacy that infects every scene, and the pure-silly pass-notes characterisation, where a person’s liking for cracking the crust of creme brulee, repairing garden gnomes or popping bubble-wrap is viewed as the key to their eternal soul.
Thankfully, before it all gets so sweet that your teeth start to decay, Amelie’s dormant sexuality is tested by a mysterious young man (La Haine director Matthieu Kassovitz) who collects discarded pictures from photo booths. From there, Amelie stops being a lovable cipher, a catalyst for the spiritual advancement of others, and starts developing a destiny all of her own. She also becomes a bit of a crazed stalker, which all obsessed, desperate women can relate to, although many of us would maybe draw a line at titillating our prey with photos of ourselves wearing Zorro masks.
At the movie’s close, the miracle is that not only have we been happy to stay with Amelie all the way through her strange, fantastical, fractured odyssey (that has more fable than Aesop), but that we would very much like to meet her again.