November 8–15, 2001

movies

Eyeful Tower

Amélie’s shallow splendor is something to behold.

by Sam Adams

Amélie

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
A Miramax release.

recommended

Smile and the world smiles with you: Audrey Tautou lights up the screen.

Imagine a movie that hooks itself directly into your brain’s pleasure centers, triggering grin after joyous grin, and you’ll have some idea what it’s like to watch Amélie. Directed and co-written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children delivered a similar kicks-per-minute ratio, Amélie cooks along on Jeunet’s characteristic blend of early-cinema wonderment and ultra-modern technical panache. (Though Jeunet is still proud of it, it’s best to avoid entirely his botched entry in the Alien series, a mismatch between filmmaker and material if ever there was one.) Audrey Tautou, an actress of silent-film beauty (Jeunet cast her after seeing her image on a Paris bus-shelter poster) plays the titular gamine, a pure-hearted waif who successfully provides for everyone’s happiness but her own.

Lest the reader begin to reach for the insulin, a clarification: Jeunet’s sense of humor tends as much toward the morbid as the sweet. An extensive prologue chronicles Amélie’s childhood in a burst of rapid-fire images overlaid with wry narration. Living a lonely life, her only companion a suicidal goldfish that keeps throwing itself out of the bowl, Amélie’s solitude is confirmed when her mother is killed by a plummeting suicide in front of Notre Dame. Jeunet, as influenced by Tex Avery as Marcel Carné, stages the shot from the jumper’s point of view, so the ground comes rushing up at us until it effectively smacks us in the nose. Jeunet’s secret is to mix pixieish sentimentality with an anarchic lack thereof; one tender conversation between Amélie’s would-be boyfriend (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his confidante takes place in the sex shop where he works as the two are pricing dildos.

In France, where the film has become an almost universally loved box-office smash, the film goes by the title The Fantastic Destiny of Amélie Poulain, which not only calls up the old movies that Amélie both honors and gently mocks, but invokes the critical idea of fate. In the world of Jeunet and co-scenarist Guillaume Laurant, fate is less a force of nature than a Rube Goldberg device, an endless chain of tricky coincidences whose final result is utterly beyond prediction. Amélie, who bustles around Montmartre giving fate a hand, is set on one task when she drops the stopper to a perfume bottle, which rolls across the bathroom floor and dislodges a tile, which leads to a crawlspace in which is hidden a decades-old box full of a young boy’s childhood mementos. She tracks the man down, hides the box in a phone booth, then has the receiver ring just as he passes, so he walks in and sees his long-buried treasure returned out of the blue — all that so she can see the tears in his eyes when he finds something he thought was lost.

In a sense, Amélie herself is just a cog in Amélie’s machine; her own pursuit of Nino (Kassovitz), who makes a hobby of collecting and reassembling the shreds of torn-up pictures he finds under instant-photo booths, is central to the film, but hardly primary. A dense, fast-paced, digitally enhanced wonderland, the film rarely stops to let you catch your breath, but where a movie like Moulin Rouge or even The Hudsucker Proxy is nearly torpedoed by its own self-conscious excess, Amélie keeps returning to Tautou’s blessedly simple performance, which is very much the eye of the storm. Likewise Kassovitz, best known as an actor and director for hard-edged films like Hate and A Self-Made Hero; here, he’s a revelation of untold sweetness. Jeunet regulars like Dominique Pinon, with his gnomish face and hyperactive eyes, make plenty of appearances, but the key performances are more elemental than any in Jeunet’s oeuvre. Of course, that just allows him to stage an even more frenetic ballet around them.

Amélie may be only an inch deep, but its appeal is several light-years wide. The movie sneaks in a clip from Jules and Jim, but it’s much closer kin to the unmoored antics of Shoot the Piano Player. It’s a movie in love with its own style, and the amour fou is contagious. Even at a full two hours, you don’t feel overwhelmed by the film’s relentless energy; Jeunet knows enough to keep shifting styles and varying the pace, even if it’s mainly to different shades of frenetic. The movie’s charms are all immediate, so there’s really nothing left to chew on when it’s over; it’s an elaborate desert, not a four-course meal. Still, there’s more inventiveness in any one of Amélie’s stunts than the entire bill at any given multiplex, so it’s hard to quibble with the film’s shallow splendor. Dive right in; just pull up before you bang your head.