Amélie (film)
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Jean-Pierre Jeunet |
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| Distributor | Miramax Home Entertainment |
| Honors | |
| Perhaps the most charming movie of all time, Amélie is certainly one of the top 10. The title character (the bashful and impish Audrey Tautou) is a single waitress who decides to help other lonely people fix their lives. Her widowed father yearns to travel but won’t, so to inspire the old man she sends his garden gnome on a tour of the world; with whispered gossip, she brings together two cranky regulars at her café; she reverses the doorknobs and reprograms the speed dial of a grocer who’s mean to his assistant. Gradually she realizes her own life needs… | |
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Perhaps the most charming movie of all time, Amélie is certainly one of the top 10. The title character (the bashful and impish Audrey Tautou) is a single waitress who decides to help other lonely people fix their lives. Her widowed father yearns to travel but won’t, so to inspire the old man she sends his garden gnome on a tour of the world; with whispered gossip, she brings together two cranky regulars at her café; she reverses the doorknobs and reprograms the speed dial of a grocer who’s mean to his assistant. Gradually she realizes her own life needs fixing, and a chance meeting leads to her most elaborate stratagem of all. This is a deeply wonderful movie, an illuminating mix of magic and pragmatism. Fans of the director’s previous films (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) will not be disappointed; newcomers will be delighted. —Bret Fetzer
Barnes and Noble
Four years after his Alien: Resurrection met with a cool reaction from U.S. audiences, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s return to French-language filmmaking is an eye-popping potpourri of magic realism. Pouty ingénue Audrey Tautou (Happenstance) is the titular heroine, a daydreaming anti-socialite who takes it upon herself to anonymously help others find happiness, whether through simple matchmaking in a café or having a garden gnome travel vicariously for her aging father (Rufus). The trouble is that no matter how hard she tries, Amélie can’t seem to make herself happy, let alone open up to her secret crush, Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a hobbyist who reconstructs discarded photo-booth pictures. A modern fairy tale bordering on a live-action cartoon, Jeunet’s Oscar-nominated feel-good film is a visual banquet of gags, swooshes, and comic-book design. He eschews the dirty, monochromatic alleys of New Wave Paris for a candy-colored vision of prewar wonder, populated with lonesome eccentrics and forever awash in accordion music. Screenwriter Guillaume Laurant, who also contributed to the fancifully dark City of Lost Children, collaborates with Jeunet on a story that is at once emotionally gratifying and hilariously surreal; inanimate objects come to life, and a reclusive artist repaints the same Renoir every year. Despite all the magical set designs and storytelling, though, the movie is tout Tautou. With saucerlike eyes that could make Betty Boop jealous, her Amélie infuses every scene with both painful shyness and romantic keening. At one point, the movie proclaims the world a harsh place for dreamers. But it also proves a bouncy treat with the potential to change all that. Tony Nigro
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Related works
Amélie: Original Soundtrack
This sunny comic fable from idiosyncratic director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children, Alien Resurrection, Delicatessen) boasts any number of intimate charms, not the least of which is Yann Tiersen’s warmly inviting score. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tiersen’s work and training may have masterfully encompassed classical, pop, and rock, but his delightful Amélie music proves he is slave to none. In this, his fourth soundtrack, Tiersen displays an impressive command of idiom and melodic subtlety that’s rightfully drawn…
