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Amelie****
Starring: Audrey Tatou and Mathieu Kassovitz
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
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Amelie, a 2001 French film starring Audrey Tautou (the French actress
in The Da Vinci Code) is a romantic comedy set in Montmartre, Paris.
The film has quite a fairy-tale like vibe to it, with colourful imagery
of a romantic, picture-perfect version of contemporary France and
bouncy, dramatized characters, each with their own stories to share.
The plot revolves around Amelie Poulain, who is born in a dysfunctional
family of a neurotic doctor father and a quirky mother. As a child,
her life could not get any stranger. Her parents decide to keep her
out of school when they mistake her quickening heart beats (brought
about by the rarity of her father's touch during his monthly check-up
of her) as a heart disorder. Her mother, in a humorous, twisted turn
of fate, dies while coming out of Notre Dame Cathedral when a suicidal
woman falls flat on her face from the top most window. As a result,
her father becomes even more of a reclusive, devoting his life to
fancying up her mother's shrine in the garden, with garden gnomes
and what not, and spending little time with her. |
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Consequently,
Amelie grows up painfully shy, with hardly any friends or parental
attention. Add in her unsuccessful romantic relationships and she
has little to turn to than her creative imagination.
One day in 1997, after the death of Princess Diana in France, Amelie
finds a loose brick come off at the bottom of her room's wall, where
she notices a little box containing the childhood relics of a man
living in the same apartment in the 50s. That night, lying awake in
her bed, she decides something: she will track down the man and return
his childhood memories to him, and if that act gives him some form
of happiness, she will devote her entire life to helping people find
joy. |
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With
such a mission in hand, she successfully tracks down the owner of
the childhood memorabilia and observes how profoundly she has touched
his life. Then starts a series of stratagems to help others in her
life-her introvert painter neighbour, her unlucky-in-love coworker,
a grocery boy being bullied by his boss, the caretaker of her apartment
and even her own father when she invisibly nudges him towards pursuing
his dream of touring the world.
Having become a guardian angel of sorts, the question arises: will
anyone help the clearly disturbed Amelie find some happiness of her
own? |
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Then enters Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), a strange, handsome
young man. He has a freaky habit of collecting photographs of people
discarded outside passport photo booths and pasting them in an album.
One day he loses that album, which Amelie finds. She tries to devise
interesting ways to give the album back to the young man, discovering
in the process that she has fallen in love with him. With her painter
friend helping her see what Amelie herself failed to notice, that
true contentment has to begin at one's own doorstep, she finally offers
some of her feel-good charm to herself and finds her own bit of happiness
at last.
The film has some quirky, hilarious moments and a dream-like quality.
It even has moments of double irony when the protagonist talks directly
to us through the camera. The plot is intriguing, though Amelie's
bizarre courtship with Nino seems to have been stretched to an uninteresting
point. But the film has a worthwhile lesson for people who spend their
lives searching for that feeling of satisfaction by helping others,
but forgetting their own well-being in the process.
– Maria Tirmizi *YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOME
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