431 - Amelie, France, 2001. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

431 - Amelie, France, 2001.  Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Amelie is a quirky girl.  With a sly smile.  In a quirky movie.

She has grown up alone.  An only child.  Homeschooled over a misunderstanding of her heart condition.  Her heart leaps for joy when her father touches her.  She longs for his love.  But he is touching her to check up on her heart.  So he believes she has a heart condition.

Her mother dies when she is six.  When they are at the cathedral of Notre Dame.  When a Canadian tourist leaps to her death.  And lands on Amelie's mother.

So as her father focuses on building a shrine to her mother in the back yard, including the addition of a garden gnome her mother hated, Amelie gets a job at the Two Windmills cafe.  The two windmills are the Moulin Rouge and the Moulin de la Galette.

Amelie works with idiosyncratic workmates and customers, and she lives in an apartment building with idiosyncratic neighbors.

Her life changes the day Princes Diana dies in a car crash.  When she hears the news, Amelie drops her perfume bottle top, and it rolls on the bathroom floor behind her and knocks open a tile in the wall--behind which she discovers a tin can containing mementos left fifty years ago by the boy who lived here.

She executes an experiment.  She decides to find the boy, now an older man, and return the tin box.  If it makes him happy, she will dedicate the rest of her life to making others happy.  If not, she will move on.

She goes on her quest.  Will she find him?  Will she make friends with her reclusive neighbor along the way?  Will she help others?

Who is that man looking under the photo booth?  And what strange feeling seems to abide between them, as if connecting them from childhood, from their respective homes just miles apart.

Amelie is the most successful French film ever shown in the United States.  It is also one of the most successful French films ever shown around the world.  Its leading man, Mathieu Kassovitz, is himself a director and directed the critically acclaimed and Criterion endorsed La Haine (1995), as well as the Halle Berry star vehicle Gothika (2003).

Its leading lady, Audrey Tatou, steals the show.