Amelie
***
Cinema
Releases - October 5, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 120 minutes. Directed
by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillaume Laurant.
Starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Yolande Moreau, Maurice
Benichou.
"Amelie" is the story of an odd
little dreamer who fills her time with odd little projects that end up leading
her to a soulmate. Audrey Tatou plays the title character, a petite and quiet
Parisian girl who reaches a turning point in her life when she finds a 1950s
cigar box hidden in her apartment. It is filled with small toys and mementos;
she calls it "a box of treasures," muses that some boy must have loved it
once, and goes on a quest to track down the owner.
She works in a café, and helps spark a
romance between a bitter guy who sits at the same booth every day and the
hypochondriac lady working the tobacco counter. She finds a bag filled with
someone's pet project, and sets up an elaborate game to help the owner track
his lost work down. And she tentatively attempts to hook up with another
dreamer -- a guy played by Mathieu Kassovitz who goes round subways collecting
discarded passport photos and collecting the anonymous faces in a loving
scrapbook.
The ads led me to believe I was going to hate
this movie, and indeed it is irritatingly cutesy at times, and not at all
the masterpiece that some have declared it. But it's also very entertaining
in parts, with endearing energy and perceptiveness, and a great deal of visual
life. It's kinda like "Cinderella" meets "Hedwig and the Angry Inch". There
are all sorts of crazy pans and cuts and montages, including a scene in which
Amelie wonders how many people are having orgasms at any given time and we
see a visualisation of all Paris couples climaxing simultaneously. The film's
voice-over is constant, but it would be a mistake to call it overbearing
-- obviously it's a stylistic choice when a narration goes so far as to delve
into characters' backstories, list their likes and dislikes, and provide
us with random tidbits of information whenever it feels they'll make us
smile.
One big problem with "Amelie" is the denouement
-- our heroine keeps setting up situations where she can introduce herself
to the Kassovitz character, and keeps backing away because of nervousness.
Over and over this happens, dragging the movie out for half an hour longer
than it has any right to last. Still, this is a good movie, and the director
-- Jean-Pierre Jeunet of the famous Jeunet & Caro team -- has managed
quite a feat in turning a French comedy about a sickly-sweet near-mute into
something pretty likeable.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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