Amelie
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Movie Reviews of Amelie
Movie Review: Amelie Poulain : The Cure to ALL of Lifes Ills
Summary: 5 Stars
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tatou in the title role, "Amelie" is set in the Montmartre area of Paris. The film focuses on Amelie, the only child of Raphael and Amandine Poulain. Her father is a neurotic ex-army doctor while her mother was a teacher with all the warmth of an iceberg. Withheld from school as a child, due to her father's mistaken belief that she had a heart defect, Amelie was educated at home - initially by her mother. Amandine died when Amelie was young, however, when she broke the fall of a suicidal Canadian jumping from the tower of Notre Dame Cathedral. Her lack of contact with other children meant her only friend was a goldfish called Blubber and led to the development of quite an active imagination. Even as an adult, Amelie amuses herself with silly questions without ever really becoming close to anyone. She regularly visits her father, Raphael - he would dearly love to travel, but is too afraid to take the first step. She works as a waitress in a café called Les Deux Moulins, a real café in Montmartre. Among her colleagues are Gina, who seems to be the closest thing to a friend Amelie has and Georgette, who runs the tabac. Georgette is quite possibly the definitive hypochondriac. One of the café's regulars is a man called Joseph - a former lover of Gina, he is an incredibly jealous and possessive character who constantly spies on her.
As the film progresses, she becomes friendly with an elderly neighbour. Commonly known as the Glass Man, his real name is Raymond Dufayel. He never leaves his apartment, and has an obsession of his own : Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party". Dufayel has painted one of his own every year for the last twenty years, but he just can't get it right. One of the film's most likeable characters is Lucien, who works at the greengrocers and takes art lessons with Dufayel. Amelie, who is very fond of Lucien, doesn't really care for his boss - the obnoxious and abusive Monsieur Collignon.
Amelie's life starts to change when she finds a small box of keepsakes hidden in the wall of her bathroom - toy cars and bikes, pictures of football players and such like. Based on the box's contents, she believes that the box was hidden there in the 50s by a young boy, and decides to reunite the box with its owner. Looking for information about who lived in her apartment at that time, she starts with Madeleine Wells. An emotional wreck, her husband ran off with his secretary to South America, and was killed in a car accident there. Nico Quincampoix, however, provides the biggest reason for change. Another loner, like Amelie, he collects photos left lying around the photo booths of the city's metro and train stations. For some reason, he keeps these in a photo album - which is found by Amelie after he drops it in the street. However, she finds she has fallen for him - but like her father, she seems afraid to take the first step.
This is easily one of the most enjoyable films I've ever seen. Set in one of the world's most beautiful cities and featuring a collection of quirky and / or likeable characters, it's a film I just can't find fault with. It's filmed in French and subtitled, which might put some people off - for me, however, the subtitles actually seem to add to the film's enjoyment.
Movie Review: Funny, heart-warming and strikingly original
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a delightful romantic fantasy of love and comedy, of vivid color and some preposterous antics of love and friendship that will send mawkish tears down your cheeks while making you laugh out loud. If not, turn in your headset for a heart.Audrey Tautou is Amelie, a fashion-sharp Parisian waitress with an impish heart of gold and an shyness born of a bizarrely restricted childhood. She is cute and innocent, but not too innocent.
Her father, who was a physician, thought she had a defective heart because every time he put the stethoscope to her little chest it was beating wildly. A voice-over explains that this was caused by the excitement that Amelie felt because her frigid father, whom she wanted so much to hold her, although he never did, was actually touching her. Because of an imagined heart condition she is kept out of school and tutored at home.
After her mother dies from being hit by a falling body (an actual human body on its way to the pavement from a tall building) we are flash-forwarded to the present where we find little Amelie all grown up. She still has no love in her life. But one day while listening to a news report of the death of Princess Di she drops something on the floor of her apartment. It rolls against a tile in the bathroom, dislodging the tile. Amelie pulls down the tile and finds in a hole in the wall a little tin box full of a boy's childhood mementoes from many years ago. In a characteristic bit of inspiration she decides to find that little boy, now grown into middle age, and give him the box. But she is shy and so must invent a stratagem. She arranges to call him when he is near a public phone booth in which she has placed the box. So delighted with the joy she has given him, Amelie sets off on a series of inventive and pixie-like intrusions into the lives of others in order to bring them happiness and even love.
While this R-rated fantasy would delight children there is too much actual sex in it for most American moms to tolerate for their little ones. In fact in the French style sex is made innocent, and of course that will not set well with those of a prudish nature.
Favorite corny pun: "Even artichokes have hearts." Favorite elaborate joke: sending her father's garden gnome on the world tour that he won't take himself, and having the gnome photographed at tourist sites and the photos sent airmail to a very perplexed dad. Favorite joke: the beggar refusing a handout saying he takes Sundays off. Favorite scheme: reconstructing through cut and paste and photocopy the words of the landlady's beloved, and then fashioning a last love letter to her from him that was lost in the mail for forty years.
The two disc set includes a wealth of information to delight afficionados. There's an interview with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, some footage on how Amelie was made, filmographies of cast and crew, audition footage, etc., etc.
Bottom line: very funny, heart-warming and strikingly original.
Movie Review: SMART ENTERTAINER
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a modern-day fairy-tale of a simple city-girl, in a seemingly idyllic backdrop, which actually is ruffled is a lot of ways, due to its rather `disturbed' characters, whose lives, while this beady-eyed waitress tries to solve, finds herself in a similar situation, where she herself ends up needing some help.AMELIE can be considered a story of stories, tied together by just a single link, in the form of a girl called Amilie. Living in her own shell, this girl discovers the Samaritan in her, when she successfully tracks down and gives the previous occupant of her apartment, a box containing objects of his childhood playthings that she accidentally finds in her house, and brings out the tears of joy in his eyes, as he reminisces his days of childhood, watching and feeling the contents of the box. This experience overwhelms her, and she decides that she would now on, do whatever she could, to straighten other people's lives, and herein lies the stories, which make the story of the movie.
The movie is made up of bits and pieces, showing the rather weird nature of the various people, that Amilie tries to help. The magic of the movie lies in this aspect of how beautifully each character is depicted, with some handicap or the other disturbing their lives, which this lonely but good-willed girl tries to fix. Be it the `obsessed' neighbor, who is more than happy to read out letters from her deal husband, or the painter, who is so touchy about how names are pronounced, or the bullying vegetable-vendor, always belittling his hapless assistant, or the loveless boyfriend and the loveless hotel-waitresses, or the young man, who sifts for torn photographs of people, and reassembles and sticks them in the album that he maintains of reassembled photos of people he doesn't even know, or even Amilie's own father, who is obsessed with his ceramic gnome, each one of them is so carefully and delicately defined, that it overshadows the ambiguity in the story, which is what it intends to do, in the first place.
Though the story has a naïve fairy-tale-like feel to it, it actually turns out otherwise, by its messed up characters. Hence, the movie, far from being a sappy and drab tale of feel-good, is actually quite an interesting take on the most unusual and uncanny facets of the human nature. Moreover, the slick cinematography and the music-video like feel of the movie, coupled with the swanky voice-over comments make it not only a visually splendid movie, but also an exciting joyride, with a lot of areas worth pondering on.
AMILIE has a mischievous undertone, with a visually pleasing and amiable exterior. When one sees beyond the pleasing epidermis of the movie, it provides for interesting food for thought, when it comes to analyzing the bizarre characters in it. For its glossy appearance, or for its underlying unapparent starkness, or for its feel-good aura, or just for its wacky imagination, AMILIE is an entertainer with brains and brawns.
Movie Review: happy and entertaining
Summary: 5 Stars
I thoroughly enjoyed this movie! It may not be an intellectual feast for the mind, or a gritty documentary about the pain and suffering of real life, but it DOES remind us of the simpler side of life and what it is to see the world as a child might see it. This is entertainment, so I must protest, it is entitled be whatever sugar-coated confection it wants to be! And it is not really so sugar-coated. Nino works in a porn shop (though it is surprisingly un-seedy), and other characters have their problems (though they seem surprisingly easy to solve by our irrepressible heroine). Amelie is a sweet, Ally McBeal-esque girl who has never really grown up. She is still the little girl who lives in a world of her own imagination. And if those glasses are rose-coloured, who are we to say that the way she sees the world is worse than the more pessimistic brand of cynicism that seems to be so rampant in "realism" today? Amelie reminds us that perhaps, after all, the children, with their innocent idealism and little games, have somehow got it right.Both Amelie and her accidental "amoureux" are adorable, though I thought perhaps Jeunet might have taken a cue from Jane Austen and pointed out that Amelie's interference with other people's lives, like Emma, sometimes turned out badly (like Georgette and her psychotic lover), and Amelie should have taken some responsibility for that. But perhaps that is my North American liberalism speaking. I loved the integration of the fantasy with reality: talking pig-lamps, the photographs that speak to Nino about the "beautiful" mysterious girl....are they merely manifestations of Nino and Amelie's subconscious thought, or is destiny really working miracles to bring them together? And it is the pointing out of the details of life that holds the movie together in terms of story. After all, most people's stories are manifested through the details...this is the stuff life (or at least an ideal one) is made of...c'est la vie. And everybody, not just Amelie and Nino, has their quirks. I thought the narrated introduction at the beginning of the film quite funny in its portrayal of the silly and the absurd that really, though exaggerated, makes up much of our lives. And the characters! Oh the characters! There's not a sane one in the lot (it has been said that the French have their own distinct brand of madness..j/k)! Nevertheless, we see echos of people we know in each of them, in the jealous boyfriend, the angry grocer, the kind painter, etc. And perhaps there is an Amelie in some of us too, shy introverts who think up strategems to avoid confronting our true passions.
Last but not least, the cinematography is excellent. It may not be realistic (I lived in Paris for a few years and it isn't), but it's a pretty fantasy of an Ideal Paris.
All in all, it's a satisfying fantasy with a happy ending. And in these days, don't we all need some more happy endings?
Movie Review: Look Past the Cover Art!
Summary: 5 Stars
I first noticed "Amelie" when going through the local DVD rental store... A woman told me that she couldn't get past the cover art of the washed- out face of Amelie to try renting the movie. The exterior art, honestly does no justice whatsoever to the gem of a disc inside (the character does not look pale like the cover photo suggests). I get very curious about the obscure titles -- especially the foreign films -- that wind up on the shelves of the rental stores, so I write down title names and surf imdb.com (internet movie database) to learn more about titles I haven't recognized. And after reading the reviews, I decided to grab the less- than- attractive box and check out the movie.
Immediately as the root menu is accessed, some rather inviting music accompanies the animated menu. So I set up the audio (no English dub, it's French language in digital 5.1 audio) and was blown away from the moment the opening scene played.
I knew from the first scene that this had the potential of being a well- written, acted, scripted, and produced movie. And as the credits rolled at the end, I wanted to see more of Amelie, who was a wonderful and genuine character, one you wished lived in your own neighborhood. And I also believe that both women and men would really enjoy this. Most guys would fall in love with Amelie's eyes, and more women would enjoy the sensitive style of creatively showing a woman's emotions. But I get the sense that a few women may not care for Amelie's character, honestly.
The original music (no lyrics) of composer Yann Tiersen will stay in your head, even if you can't get past the subtitles. Tiersen did a fabulous job of creating a score that suits every scene it's played in. The audio is rich and expansive, and can be enjoyed with even the most basic speakers.
"Amelie" makes me wish that I had learned French, and I envy anyone who understands the language for being able to understand the dialogue without having to read a translation. It can be a little difficult to have to watch two things at once -- subtitles and a movie -- because early on, you'll feel like you're missing the movie everytime you have to read the translation. But trust me on this, "Amelie from Montmartre" is a movie that you'll enjoy watching again and again. It's a rare treat to find a movie that doesn't get "tired." And as you watch "Amelie" again, you'll enjoy more of the cinematography and the lush, saturated colorful scenes.
The DVD has many different options to dive into, which is a great thing since you'll probably fall in love with "Amelie."
PS- For lovers of traditional blues, watch for a B&W clip on the television of an elderly one- legged man tap dancing. His name is "Peg Leg" Sam (Jackson), and there are two CDs of music that this late singer recorded, "Kickin' It" and "Early in the Morning." Well worth the search.