Feb 24, 2009 01:36 PM
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Amelie or Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, is like eating vanilla icecream on a sunny summer afternoon or sitting alone on a virgin beach early in the morning…..refreshing and just so happy!
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie is a film about an extremely imaginative young girl who had a very isolated upbringing. And what an imagination! Stuck between a cold father and a frigid mother she imagines clouds to be fluffy cotton bunnies and LP records to be made like black pancakes.
Her only constant companion is a suicidal goldfish that leaves no opportunity to take its own life to the dismay of Amelie and hysteria of her mother.
The story is fairly simple; Amelie leaves her claustrophobic house at a young age to get away from her depressed and depressing widowed (if deaths can be funny, here is one) father and settles down in Montemarte in Paris as a waitress.
Life is uneventful until she encounters an old box of a childs play things that was hidden behind a loose tile in her bathroom thirty or so years ago. At this point (in 2001) Lady Diana dies and seeing her life parallel the sad and lonely life of the princess, Amelie decides that she would return the box to the now old man and if this act brings joy to the said man she would commit herself to a life of good deeds.
Here the fun begins as Amelie being shy and wallflowerish, devises elaborate stratagemsto get the box to the above old man without actually taking credit for it. The result is splendidly positive and so the journey of Saint Amelie begins.
She amusingly gets back at her local grocer for mistreating his challenged assistant, gives her sad and drunk building supervisor a romantic closure after decades and falls in love with an equally maladjusted young man on the way.
The movie begins with the private world of Amelie as a child and if the opening credits donot make you give up all work and sit down then the opening lines will. The imagery is unique (possibly not to French cinema) and the depiction of peoples’ little quirks as a way to define them quite hilarious.
And what an amazing background score, the net is littered with adaptations of it on all manner of musical instruments, just try putting Amelie on youtube search and see your worries go away.
Amelie is played to absolute perfection by Audrey Totou. Da Vinci Code had not yet happened and in this movie the pixie actress is gut wrenchingly beautiful and gorgeously fresh like a newly minted coin! Words are not enough to describe Amelie and Audrey as there is no boundary where one begins and the other ends. She makes the character her own and the movie utterly watchable.
Mathieu Kassovitz, the actor director as Amelies’ object of secret desire and unrequited love Nino Quincampoix, is himself quirky and weird enough to make you fall in love. See Amelie heart actually pump like a machine when she first encounters Nino on all fours scaling out torn old passport photographs from under a fotoflash booth on a train terminal early one morning.
The rest of the cast shows just the detailing that went into the casting, many are Juenet regulars that revisit in his other movies. Dominique Pinon as the love sick and jealous former lover of Amelies’ co-worker is splendid and Jamel Debbouze as the physically and possibly mentally challenged assistant of Amelie’ local grocer is perfection.
If you’ve have had a bad day, the boss has been excessively foolish or there just doesn’t seem to be anything right with the world, watch Amelie and believe me, she’ll make you see the world through her tinted glasses!
