November 8–15, 2001

movies

Gaul or Nothing

Amélie’s Jeunet wants to bring Hollywood to France, not the other way around.

by Sam Adams

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jean-Pierre Jeunet has been working on his newest film for most of his life. Amélie, the latest from the 46-year-old director of Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and Alien: Resurrection, is a tightly wound contraption that rests on the story of the titular matchmaker, but it’s really a collection of anecdotes, moments and images Jeunet has been scribbling in a series of notebooks for the last quarter-century. "I had this collection," he recalls by phone from New York, "and I wanted to write a story to put them all together. I began to work on it before Alien, but I thought maybe it was a subject for four or five movies, not for one. I had the story of a woman helping other people, but it was just one story in the middle of all the others."

The tightly structured film went through dozens of iterations — even the title changed, wavering from Amélie de Montmartre, Amélie des Abbesses, le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (its release title in Jeunet’s native France), even, Jeunet swears, Raiders of the Goosebumps. Initially, Jeunet was so struck by Emily Watson’s performance in Breaking the Waves that he wanted her for the role now played by the dazzling Audrey Tautou; the script was rewritten to accommodate an Amélie who had grown up outside London, and Jeunet shot several screen tests with Watson in the role. But Watson bowed out "for personal reasons," Jeunet saw Tautou’s face on a poster for Venus Beauty Institute, and the rest is history.

Jeunet’s films — especially his first two, designed by collaborator Marc Caro — take place in a world composed of both futuristic or fairy-tale elements and shreds of a discarded past. Amélie is Jeunet’s first movie to be set in anything resembling the real world, but the cluttered streets of Montmartre have been digitally airbrushed to a nostalgic glow. "I love the pictures of the ’40s, where the streets are empty," Jeunet explains. "So we got rid of the cars in the street. Sometimes, we put just one car, because it was too strange to have the street completely empty. Sometimes, I did two takes, one with car, one without car." Though the film has been overwhelming applauded by French critics (not to mention President Jacques Chirac), one particularly vicious critique in the newspaper Libération suggested that the film’s whitewashing of the racially mixed Montmartre amounts to nothing less than an ad for the right-wing Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front. "I got 400 good reviews, and maybe six bad ones," Jeunet shrugs. "I know that [Libération] guy, and he hates everything I do. Now his best friend won’t even talk to him, I hear."

Though Amélie tips its hat to Jules and Jim, panning over the delighted faces of an audience in the midst of surrendering to its charms, Jeunet all but spits when the Nouvelle Vague comes. "Oh, I hate the New Wave," he says, "except for the first Truffaut movies. It’s all sad stories, couples fighting in the kitchen. And Jean-Luc Godard — I hate him!" Instead, Jeunet champions the new wave of audience-friendly French filmmakers, the so-called "Gaulywood" set. "There’s a new generation with Delicatessen and Luc Besson," he says. "We try to have the same efficiency — good sound, good picture — as American movies, and the audience loves that. If we tried to just rip off American movies, it wouldn’t be good for French movies; we have to keep the culture, the European culture. But for the first time, the box office is much better [in France] for French movies than American movies, because our thinking is for the audience, and it is the first time."