Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I recall pretty well the appearance of this movie on the media landscape. I don’t think I saw any trailers, but Audrey Tautou’s face was suddenly in a lot of places. I never got any sense of why people loved this movie, but it looked like a painting and was probably a romance, so I never really took an interest in it. But it kept being out there, and when I decided to do a tour of foreign-language movies, this was an easy pick.

I have to wonder if I’d have been more enticed by a direct translation of the French title. “Amélie” tells me nothing except that it’s about a girl named Amélie. “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain” at least conveys some kind of tone and direction.

After watching the movie:

Amélie Poulain was raised by the kind of parents who were already going to have a child that was a little off-kilter, but as the only time her emotionally distant doctor father touched her was when he was giving her a physical exam, he always mistook her heart flutter from that excitement for a birth defect and decided it would be best to homeschool her, and then when Amélie was 6, her mother died in a random and absurd accident and her father withdrew into his gardening, leaving her completely alone to her imagination and impish pranks. Now an adult waitress at the 2 Windmills Cafe, her life is very internal, until one day she finds a box of childhood mementos left by a former resident of her apartment decades ago, and decides to track down the boy it belonged to and return it to him. If it all works out, she’ll devote herself to intricate strategies of chaotic good. The investigation leads her to get to know many of the other tenants, including the old man with brittle bone disease who has spent his life hiding in the safety of his apartment making copy after copy of the same Renoir painting. On the smashing success of the return of the boy’s box, Amélie starts meddling for good. But when she embarks on a mission to reunite Nino, a young man as lonely as her, with his photo album that turns out to be not family photos but a collection of strangers’ discarded photo booth portraits, coming to understand who Nino Quincampoix is awakens an attraction in her she didn’t know she was capable of, which scares her.

The first thing that charmed me about this movie was the daydreaming element of Amélie’s childhood that didn’t last in the way I hoped it would. There are a handful of imagine spots, but it wasn’t as Mittyesque as I was hoping. However, as much as Amélie and her story are quirky (and I think this comes just at the beginning of the ascension of the quirky dreamer girl), it’s balanced out by the brutally deadpan narration, which consistently delivers the best laughs. But the enduring spark of this story is the examination of the eccentricities of a whole town full of people that become apparent only when you stop and get to know them. Amélie knows her coworkers and regulars, sure, but her initial project gets her out into the broader community and we get to learn everyone’s foibles.

I never would have guessed this movie is set in 1997 (in the days and weeks after the death of Princess Diana). It’s set in Montmartre in Paris, and there’s really only one setting that looks like it didn’t come out of the 1960s at the latest, if not a Van Gough painting. I’m sure there was a lot of conscious thought went into choosing timeless locations and lighting them like the impressionists, every bit as much as went into the eccentric and deliberate camera movement. This movie is as much a piece of visual art as the artful approach to life it meditates on.

As the plot came into focus around Amélie not just helping and studying Nino from a distance, but falling in love with him from a distance, I started to disengage a bit. Of course, Amélie needs to have a turn in her internal arc where she learns to open up to those around her, but it felt a bit simple to just open up to romantic love. The pair may have come to an understanding of each other from a distance, but they proceed immediately from their first proper face to face meeting after several days of cat and mouse games to the happily ever after, and that seems to completely skip over any of the mess that was starting to show around her other random acts of creative meddling.

I loved everything about this movie until it had to reach an endpoint. A beautiful, whimsical, wistful yet frank movie I slept too long on, but ultimately it swapped out the challenge it looked like it was setting up for Amélie with a safer one. We may have moved on from manic pixie dream girls, but this world is Amélie’s, and I think that gives her some license to be an eccentric dreamer, with more flaws than are usually seen in the archetype. I just wish the third act lived up to the rest.