Amélie (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain)
Original French theatrical poster
Directed by	Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Produced by	Jean-Marc Deschamps Claudie Ossard
Written by	Guillaume Laurant Jean-Pierre Jeunet (scenario) Guillaume Laurant (dialogue)
Narrated by	André Dussollier
Starring	Audrey Tautou Mathieu Kassovitz Rufus Claire Maurier Isabelle Nanty Dominique Pinon Serge Merlin Jamel Debbouze Arthus de Pengerne Maurice Bénichou
Music by	Yann Tiersen
Cinematography	Bruno Delbonnel
Editing by	Hervé Schneid
Distributed by	UGC (France) Miramax (USA)[1]
Release date(s)	April 25, 2001, October 5, 2001, November 16, 2001 December 21, 2001
Running time	122 min.
Country	France /  Germany
Language	French
Budget	€11,400,000[1]
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Amélie (Tautou), her father Raphaël (Rufus), and the travelling garden gnome.

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Life of Amélie Poulain), also known simply as Amélie, is a 2001 French film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Audrey Tautou. Written by Guillaume Laurant (also dialogue) and Jeunet, the film is a whimsical and somewhat idealised depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre.

The film was released in France, Belgium, and French-speaking western Switzerland in April 2001, with subsequent screenings at various film festivals followed by releases around the world.

Amélie won best film at the European Film Awards; it won four César Awards (including Best Film and Best Director), two BAFTA Awards (including Best Original Screenplay), and was nominated for five Academy Awards. It is the highest-ranking French movie in the IMDb's Top 250. (See below for other awards and recognition.)

Synopsis

Amélie is the story of Amélie Poulain, a girl who grows up isolated from other children by Raphaël, her taciturn doctor father, due to his mistaken belief that she suffers from a heart condition (a mistake in fact resulting from the increase in her heartbeat caused by the rare thrill of physical contact by her father, who only ever touches her during medical check-ups). Her mother (who is just as neurotic as her father) dies when Amélie is young, victim of a freak accident involving a suicidal Quebecoise woman who throws herself off the top of Notre Dame Cathedral and lands on Amélie's mother, causing her father to withdraw even further (and devote his life to building a rather eccentric shrine to his late wife). Left to amuse herself, Amélie develops an unusually active imagination.

When she grows up, Amélie becomes a waitress in a small Montmartre café, The Two Windmills, run by a former circus performer. The café is staffed and frequented by a gang of eccentrics. By age 22, life for Amélie is simple; having spurned romantic relationships following a few failed efforts, she has devoted herself to simple pleasures, such as cracking crème brûlée with a teaspoon, going for walks in the Paris sunshine, skipping stones across St. Martin's Canal, trying to guess how many couples in Paris are having an orgasm at one moment ("Fifteen!", she informs the camera), and letting her imagination roam free.

L'épicerie of Monsieur Collignon, Rue des Trois Frères, Paris, used as a film location

Her life changes on the same day that Princess Diana dies. Following a series of circumstances resulting from her shock at the news, behind a loose bathroom tile she finds an old metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades ago. Fascinated by the find, she resolves to track down the now grown-up man who put it there and return it to him, making a deal with herself in the process: if she finds him and it makes him happy, she will devote her life to goodness.

She meets her reclusive neighbour Raymond Dufayel, a painter who continually repaints Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le Déjeuner des canotiers) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He is known as 'the Glass Man' because of his brittle bone condition. With his help, she tracks the former occupant down, and places the box in a phone booth, ringing the number as he passes to lure him there. Upon opening the box, the man, moved to tears, has an epiphany as long-forgotten childhood memories come flooding back. She trails him to a nearby bar and observes him secretly. On seeing the positive effect she had on him, she resolves from that moment on to do good in the lives of others.

Amélie becomes a secret matchmaker and guardian angel executing complex but hidden schemes impacting the lives of those around her but with subtle and arms length manipulation. This leads to several sub plots and episodes. She escorts a blind man to the Metro station, giving him a rich description of the street scenes he passes. She persuades her father to follow his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and has an air-hostess friend send pictures of it from all over the world. She match makes a co-worker with one of the customers in the bar. She persuades the unhappy concierge of her building that the husband who abandoned her had in fact sent her a final love letter just before his death. She supports Lucien, the boy who works for and is bullied by Mr. Collignon, the owner of the neighbourhood green grocer. By playing practical jokes on Collignon she undermines his confidence until he questions his own sanity.

However, while she is looking after others, Mr Dufayel is observing her and begins a conversation with her about his painting. He has repeatedly painted the same piece because he cannot quite capture the excluded look of the girl drinking a glass of water. They repeatedly discuss the meaning of this character and although it is never explicitly said she comes to represent Amélie and her lonely life. Through their discussions Amélie is forced to examine her own life and her attraction to a stranger, a quirky young man who collects the discarded photographs of strangers from passport photo booths, with whom she has never spoken. She begins to observe him from a distance and is on the scene to pick up his photo album when it is dropped in the street. She finds his name is Nino Quincampoix and plays a cat and mouse game with him around Paris before eventually anonymously returning his treasured album.

It takes Raymond Dufayel's insightful friendship to give her the courage to overcome her shyness and finally meet with Nino.

Cast

The Two Windmills cafe in Montmartre, used as a film location

• Audrey Tautou - Amélie Poulain
• Mathieu Kassovitz - Nino Quincampoix
• Rufus - Raphaël Poulain
• Lorella Cravotta - Amandine Poulain
• Serge Merlin - Raymond Dufayel
• Jamel Debbouze - Lucien
• Clotilde Mollet - Gina
• Claire Maurier - Suzanne
• Isabelle Nanty - Georgette
• Dominique Pinon - Joseph
• Artus de Penguern - Hipolito
• Yolande Moreau - Madeleine Wallace
• Urbain Cancelier - Collignon
• Maurice Bénichou - Dominique Bretodeau
• Michel Robin - Mr. Collignon
• Andrée Damant - Mrs. Collignon
• Claude Perron - Eva, Nino's colleague
• Armelle - Philomène, air hostess
• Ticky Holgado - Man in photo
• Kevin Fernandes - Bretodeau, as a child
• Flora Guiet - Amélie, 6 years old
• Amaury Babault - Nino, as a child
• André Dussollier - Narrator

Le déjeuner des canotiers by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The girl drinking the glass of water in the centre of the picture comes to represent Amélie

Production

In his commentary on the DVD edition, Jeunet explains that he originally wrote the role of Amélie for the British actress Emily Watson; in the original draft, Amélie's father was an Englishman living in London. However, Watson's French was not strong, and when she became unavailable to shoot the film, owing to a conflict with the filming of Gosford Park, Jeunet rewrote the screenplay for a French actress. Audrey Tautou was the first actress he auditioned.

The filmmakers made use of computer-generated imagery and a digital intermediate.^[2]

The studio scenes were filmed in the Coloneum Studio in Cologne (Germany).

Reception and criticism

Racism accusation

Lucien (Jamel Debbouze)

The film was a critical and commercial success, but it was attacked by critics such as Serge Kaganski of les Inrockuptibles for its depiction of a largely unrealistic and picturesque vision of contemporary French society, a postcard universe of a bygone France with few people from ethnic minorities — some kind of latent lepénisme. ^{[citation needed]} If the director was trying to create an idyllic vision of a perfect Paris, the critics argued, he seemed to think that it was necessary to remove nearly all black people from the scene in order to do so. However, Jeunet dismissed such criticism by pointing out both that the photo collection contains pictures of many different people from numerous ethnic backgrounds, and that Jamel Debbouze, who plays Lucien, is of North African descent.^[3]

Cannes rejection

Cannes Film Festival selector Gilles Jacob described Amélie as "uninteresting", and therefore it was not screened at the festival, although the version he viewed was an early cut without music. The absence of Amélie at the festival caused something of a controversy because of the warm welcome by the French media and audience in contrast with the reaction of the selector. ^[4]

Plot similarity

The plot of the central love story in which Amelie meets her love interest, who collects discarded photographs from a photobooth, bears a similarity to the plot of a 1999 British short film, The Photoman. ^[5]

Awards

The film was a critical and box office success, gaining wide play internationally as well. It was nominated for five Academy Awards:

• Best Art Direction, Aline Bonetto (art director), Marie-Laure Valla (set decorator)
• Best Cinematography, Bruno Delbonnel
• Best Foreign Language Film, France
• Best Original Screenplay, Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
• Best Sound, Vincent Arnardi, Guillaume Leriche, Jean Umansky

In 2001 it won several awards at the European Film Awards, including the Best Film award.

It also won the People's Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Crystal Globe Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

In 2002, in France, it won the César Award for:

• Best Film
• Best Director
• Best Music
• Best Art Direction

The film was selected by The New York Times as one of "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made."^[6]

It has a prominent place on IMDB's list of top 250 films hovering around the positions of 26-33.

Artwork featured

• The film features the artwork of Michael Sowa, whose paintings adorn the walls in Amélie's bedroom, at one point engaging in a surreal conversation about Amélie's love life.

Film clips used

The film featured film or video clips from the following:

• A TV performance by the manic guitar-playing gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe^[1];
• An excerpt of the documentary Born for Hard Luck, by Tom Davenport, featuring "Peg Leg" Sam Jackson^[7]
• An excerpt of the 1998 documentary Seventeen Seconds to Sophie by Bill Cote^[8][9]
• A clip from Father's Little Dividend
• Three clips from François Truffaut's French New Wave film Jules et Jim:
• Jules, Jim and Catherine running across an overpass.
• A "kissing scene" during which a bug, apparently unnoticed by the filmmakers, crawls across the screen behind the two lovers and appears to enter the woman's mouth. This clip is specifically discussed by the narrator of Amélie, and during the clip a circle is superimposed around the bug to highlight its travel.
• A brief excerpt of Catherine singing her song, Le Tourbillon.
• A segment from French television where a horse runs along a road with cyclists during the Criterium International.

Music / Soundtrack

Main article: Amélie (soundtrack)

Also See: Yann Tiersen

Translation differences

In the English subtitled version, the concierge, Madeleine Wallace, is renamed Madeleine Wells in order to maintain a joke in the screenplay: in the original French, she mentions that she is destined to cry because of her surname Wallace (referring to the Wallace fountains of Paris). The English version keeps the joke by comparing Wells to water wells.

In the Region 1 English subtitled DVD when Amélie orders Nino to look at 'page 51' of his scrapbook, the subtitle erroneously reads 'Page St.' When a television set programmed for the United States is set to display closed captioning, the proper dialog is displayed.

In the Movie scene, Amelie says "But, I hate it in old movies, when drivers don't watch the road" in the subtitled version; however in the French version, she says "But I hate it in old American films when the drivers don't watch the road"

See also

• Cinema of France
• List of French language films
• Random act of kindness

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le at the Internet Movie Database
2. ^ http://www.variety.com/ac2005_article/VR1117915901?nav=lenser&categoryid=1804
3. ^ Jeunet, Jean-Pierre (director). Amélie [DVD].
4. ^ http://www.avclub.com/content/node/22708
5. ^ http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/654709
6. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/ref/movies/1000best.html
7. ^ http://www.folkstreams.net/film,1
8. ^ http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/atom_147
9. ^ http://www.bcvideo.com/fmom20.html (entire 56-second film is downloadable)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Amélie

• Reviews of Amélie on Metacritic
• Jean Pierre Jeunet Discusses the Film

Cinema of France
	Films A-Z • Films by year:  1892-1919 • 1920s • 1930s • 1940s • 1950s • 1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s Actors • Directors • Cinematographers • Editors • Producers • Score composers • Screenwriters

Donate to Wikimedia