Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

FEATURING: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Dominique Pinon, Rufus

PLOT: An introverted and imaginative Parisian girl devotes herself to secretly helping those around her, but is it only because she’s afraid to go after love herself?

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: If Amélie makes the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies, it will thanks to the “sliding scale” rule: the better a movie is, the less weird it needs to be to qualify. While Amélie has more than its share of literally magical moments, it’s a little hard to swallow that something this universally beloved could qualify as “weird.” Describing it, fans will often resort to such “weird-lite” adjectives as “peculiar/odd/quirky.” Still, it is a much-adored movie, and it may be a worthwhile addition to the List to represent the more whimsical side of the weird.

COMMENTS: Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, the two early 1990s collaborations between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, were spicy-sweet concoctions. Each was at heart a romantic fantasy, whether the story was about lovers rescued from cannibals or fairy tale orphans adopted by circus strong men, but a note of piquant surrealism always added bite to the sentimental overtones. When the pair split, it became clear which one was the romantic and which the weirdo; without Caro’s dark humor grounding him, Jeunet was, for better or worse, set free to soar into the stratosphere of whimsy. So comes Amélie, a life-affirming trifle which is about twice as tickly and almost as substantial as the bubbles rising off a glass of Dom Perignon. In Audrey Tautou, Jeunet found the perfect actress to embody his pixie girl who secretly enters the lives of others to bring joy or justice. Tautou has huge, liquid brown eyes that look like cross between a six-year old girl’s and a puppy dog’s. She’s incredibly beautiful, but so cute and girlish that it’s impossible to lust after her; it’s almost impossible to think of her as a sexual creature at all. And for most of the movie, she isn’t; her amiable frigidity is the source of altruistic superpowers, and overcoming her lack of sexual selfishness constitutes her heroine’s journey. Amélie’s childhood background is delivered breezily, complete with animated crocodiles and suicidal pet fish. She grows up as a sheltered introvert with an imagination that brings her skies full of bunnies and teddy bears; as a new adult, she shyly enters into a squeaky clean movie version of Paris that comes dangerously close to kitsch (you half expect to see characters walking around in those berets and striped shirts actors wore in Benny Hill sketches to indicate they were tres French). Fortunately, there are interesting, conflicted people sitting around in cafés with thorny problems for her to solve, including rejected lovers, hypochondriac tobacconists, abandoned wives, and cruel street grocers. She secretly and shyly manipulates their lives, largely as a way of avoiding her own attraction to a man whose hobby is collecting pictures discarded at photo booths; she eventually succumbs to her desires, but putters about with oblique stratagems for meeting her beau that involve various disguises, puzzles and scavenger hunts as she delays her own happiness as long as possible. It may sound insufferably cute, like a diabolical plot by some French Frank Capra to turn Americans into a bunch of Francophilic wimps, but it really is legitimately charming, grandly cinematic, and amusing. Wonderfully unreal, magical diversions abound, such as glowing hearts, talking photographs, and people spontaneously dissolving into puddles. The TV channel that’s beamed into Amélie’s Montparnasse flat features nothing but the bizarrest programming: one despondent night, she watches her own funeral parade on the tube. Frothy, funny, and French almost to a fault, it’s easy to see why this uplifting movie has won so many hearts over the years; the film is harder to resist than Tautou’s smile. Still, I note that, despite its overall exceptional quality, Amélie doesn’t feature that one tour de force scene, like the bedspring symphony in Delicatessen or the incredible teardrop sequence from City of Lost Children, to hang its hat on. Jeunet without Caro, to me, is like McCartney without Lennon; and although I appreciate Amélie for what it is, part of me will always think the script would have been punchier if one of Caro’s cannibal butchers has popped up to thin out the cast.

After they ended their partnership, Jeunet went on to unprecedented success with Amélie; his film school friend Marc Caro’s directorial career did not take off so well. After 1995’s City of Lost Children, Caro did not direct a solo feature until 2008’s sci-fi flop Dante o1. He has found work as an art director, however, including designing sets for Gaspar Noe‘s spectacular Enter the Void, the third Certified Weird project he was involved in.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…very peculiar but utterly captivating… it takes awhile to get used to the loopy sensibilities and biting, sometimes dark humor.”–Jeff Vice, Deseret News (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Nobody,” who called it “a beautiful and unique movie.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)