Amelie - Jean Pierre Jeunet

In the words of a character in the movie, “This story is about the girl who’s in the middle, yet outside.” She is in the middle of reality, sanity and the mundane but is  an outsider to the very world, the surroundings, the milieu she lives within. And so, she has woven a world of dreams, perceptions and hallucinations around her, which she comfortably inhabits, surrounded by capricious and idiosyncratic characters.

Told in a narrative style, this movie is predominantly belongs to the humor genre, although it stands out from its contemporaries owing to its distinctive dialogues, narrative style and character projections. It is a playful flirtation of a director courting his own imagination and creativity!

Born to a teacher mother and a doctor father, both of whom are rather idiosyncratic with regard to their likes, dislikes, young Amelie is soon confined to private tuitions by her mother (who dies because of a freak accident involving a suicidal attempt by another woman) because of erroneous diagnosis by her father. As a result, she is unable to befriend kids her age and grows up to be a rather eccentric (much like her parents) but endearing character. Her sole companions are concoctions of her own half-baked mind, characters taking form in pictures, images and animals. She grows up to be a reticent waitress who indulges in simple pleasures like dipping her hands in a sack of grains, hurling stones into the river, and counting how many couples are having orgasms in any given moment.

One routine day, she stumbles across a box full of memorabilia of the apartment’s previous occupant and decides that she must do a good deed and return them to him (who must want them, she assumes). She also decides that should this project ensue successfully, she’ll become a regular do-gooder. After some research, she manages to find the owner, who gets nostalgic upon seeing the box, and declares that he must establish contact with her long estranged daughter. “It’s time I look them up before I am in a box myself”, he says.

“Amelie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It’s a perfect moment, soft light, a scene in the air, a quiet murmur of the city…A surge of love, an urge to help mankind comes over her” – These words betraying a hint of poetic revelation, echo her emotions once she reunites the young boy in the man to his most insightful possessions, and starts dreaming of becoming a famous missionary who is remembered for the work she did but dies before her time is due.

She snaps out her reverie and determines that she will be the ultimate “Mother Teresa”. In the following scene, as her second good deed, she helps a blind man cross the road and gives him a glimpse of the world that’s alien to him – in the minutest details, like a portrait speaking out loud about its own contents. Simultaneously, she also tries to play cupid and guardian angel for her friends, in her quest for goodness that permeates through her like water in the sand.

However, soon she is also made aware of her own loneliness when she is reminded that she also wants to love and be loved – “It’s called reality check, what any girl wants” – and she falls in love with a man who she knows through an album that he dropped while chasing another man. In the album, she finds various torn photographs put together(like a jigsaw puzzle) of different characters. Apparently, her love interest has a habit of collecting torn, discarded pictures of people taken in photo kiosks, and putting them back together (he is made of the same dreamy, eccentric fabric as Amelie - who says opposites attract?). She goes to meet with him at an adult shop where he works, and leaves a message for him to get in touch with her to get his album back. She then devises an ingenious plan to meet with him in the perfect way, but things seem to go wrong as she chickens out. Her cat and mouse games go astray and she almost gives up on hope of meeting with him when she spots him talking to one of her coworkers. However, with some good motivational talk from the sagacious painter (Dufayel), Amelie unites with him and lives happily ever after, presumably.

The movie has some outstanding dialogues – intellectual yet funny – and actors do justice to their roles. Perhaps it is the genius of French, who can concoct the most imaginative stories that constantly cross over between the real and the surreal. The characters are strange yet fitting – an obsessive, crazy jilted lover who constantly keeps a check on his ex-girlfriend; a fragile, delicate boned Artist who befriends and talks to Amelie through his painting, relating her to a girl in his painting who has same notions and travails that she does; a strange father who thinks he has a magical gnome that has gone on a world tour and sends him postcards; a vendor’s assistant who takes some unreal carnal pleasure in feeling the softness of fruits; and not to forget her own love interest, who is always looking under a kiosk for discarded pictures, talking to figments of his own imagination.

All these elements come together like various shades in a painting, creating a real masterpiece that captures all aspects of the subject that culminates.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the Van Gogh of our time of the French cinema!

Here's one of my favorite scenes in the film - Amelie helping the blind man.