Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain | Amelie (2001)

OK, another moan about the translation, but what a leap from Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain to simple Amelie, without even an accent on the 'e', as if a British or an American audience would be put off knowing the film is French, or even worse by realising that it is subtitled. Mercifully, my DVD didn't come with subtitles, so I have no idea what horrors they hold.

This is in fact the third time I've watched this film, and each time it still seems fresh, reminding me of a number of things I'd forgotten. But it's difficult to know where to start just by mentioning a few sentences that sum up this movie that is so well known and in a sense crazy: the humour comes from the characters and following on from that from their actions, not particularly from the words used here. In such a way, it's easy to understand the movie's huge success abroad: this is not slapstick, but the actions make it a modern relation to Tati's films, even go back to Chaplin or Keaton. What is obvious is that the characters are an exaggeration of similar characters we know in 'real life', even of ourselves.

Sometimes Amélie (Audrey Tautou), an outsider in that she was educated at home because it was thought that she had a bad heart, can be mischievous and play games on people she doesn't like: as a young girl she secretly annoys a neighbour by climbing on the roof and interferes with his TV aerial during an important football match he's watching; in the same spirit (now grown up) she doesn't like the way the local greengrocer humiliates his assistant, so she gains entrance to his house to wreak gentle and harmless havoc, although he does at times appear to doubt his  own sanity. Mainly, though, Amélie does good.

The beginning of Amélie's activities as a do-gooder (in the most positive sense of the term) is when finds an old box of children's treasures in a hole in the skirting board of her bathroom. Finding out the man's name is Dominique Bretodeau is just the first part of the detective work, but she eventually manages to track him down, but is too timid to reveal herself: she leaves the box in a telephone booth which she phones as he passes, he is overjoyed to discover it, and (still not revealing herself) follows him into a bar and listens to him tell the barkeepers his amazing story.

From then on she continues the good work: she brings her grieving, widowed father back to life by borrowing his precious garden gnome and having an air hostess post shots of the gnome from various places in the world; her concierge Madeleine has been depressive since her husband's death forty years before, but Amélie fakes a letter 'written' by him and 'lost in the post', thus inspiring fresh life into Madeleine; and she brings together the tobacconist and lottery ticket seller Georgette (Isabelle Nanty) and Joseph (Dominique Pinon). But this is all vicarious, and her personal life is devoted to others.

Georgette and Joseph, er, come together in Le Café des 2 moulins in Rue Lepic, the windmills being the Moulin Rouge and the Moulin de la Galette, both of which are in Montmartre, where much of Amélie Poulain is set, and the café is where Amélie works. I took the photo below in September 2018. 

The principal story within the stories of the movie, though, concerns Amélie's fascination with, and eventual love for, Nino (Mathieux Kassovitz), who works in a sex shop and rides a bécane. His obsession is collecting photos customers have rejected from Photomatons on the métro, often tearing them up. By chance Amélie finds an album Nino has made containing these photos (often pieced together), and is inevitably smitten.

The story of how Amélie and Nino get together is beyond the scope of this comment, but this is a wondrous film, as indeed are probably the majority of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films, although so far I've only seen Un long dimanche de fiançailles and Delicatessen.