Film

Amélie (2001)

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Closeted Amélie Poulain (Guiet), eight, enjoys the little things, like picking cored raspberries off the tips of her fingers. In the hectic comic overture of this sweet-hearted nostalgia fest, director Jeunet offers a colour-saturated compendium of her likes and dislikes that leaves you breathless, amazed and laughing. Cut to summer 1997: grown-up Amélie has moved to Montmartre, where she works in a café and has a revelation that her life's work should be to bring good to others. But what of herself? Love's destiny presents a puzzle: could scraps of photo-booth snaps dropped by handsome stranger Nino (Kassovitz) provide a clue? Swinging away from the grotesquerie of Delicatessen and City of Lost Children to celebratory fable, Jeunet brings the same mastery of detailed, allusive mise-en-scène, set design and colour composition to this love poem to la vie Parisienne. Central to Jeunet's vision is the anchoring performance of Tautou (as the adult Amélie), through whose innocent eyes this carnival of earthly pleasures, places and people is seen. If it errs towards the sentimentality of '30s populist comedies, it nevertheless mines a mighty vein of cinematic encouragement.

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