May 06, 2005 12:57 PM
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(Updated May 06, 2005 01:09 PM)
Amelie ( Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain ) is a French film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. It was nominated for the best foreign film at Oscars in 2001 with No Mans land and Lagaan being the other nominees. It is quite interesting and also saddening to note that a movie like Amelie is even compared with Lagaan.
Cast: Audrey Tautou as Amelie, Mathieu Kassovitz as Nino, Serge Merlin as Dufayel
[first lines]
Narrator: On September 3rd 1973, at 6:28pm and 32 seconds, a bluebottle fly capable of 14,670 wing beats a minute landed on Rue St Vincent, Montmartre. At the same moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat, 28 Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugène Colère erased his name from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphaël Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amélie Poulain was born.
There is no denying fact that human beings are conformists. We tend to follow trends and are often irritated by Any change in patterns other than those which suit over convictions. And therefore the ones among us who are gifted with wings of change find this general conformist and monotonous attitude of everybody else very binding. These warriors of intellectual freedom often term this normal course of life as bourgeois. Movie making has its share of it bourgeois and that too a major one. It would not be wrong to say that most of the movies we see have predictable characters, plots and storytelling styles. Yet there are a few movies, which show exceptional and radical style of filmmaking. Those, which go beyond the established rules and present a totally new facade of art of movie making.
Amelie is an attempt, which will be on the top list of the second category.
Hipolito (The Writer): We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.
Amelie is a story of a intelligent but shy girl living in the city of Paris. She works at a cafe by the name of Two Windmills and visits her father on weekends. Her father who lives alone after death of Amelie's mother, loves his garden Gnome. He often discards the advice of her daughter to ''go see the world''. Meanwhile Amelie finds a 40 yr old toy box hidden behind a loose tile in her apartment. She decides to return it to its owner who as a boy must have hidden it there. After anonymously delivering the box to its owner and seeing the great happiness in his eyes, Amelie decides she is going to help people. She makes two unhappy people fall in love and sends her father's gnome on world tour. Amelie is sympathetic to the local grocer's assistant Lucien who is constantly bullied by his boss. Amelie even punishes the rude grocer in her own funny ways. She sends videos of the ‘outside world’ to a old painter Dufayel, who has never gone out for last twenty years. In midst of all this she falls in love with a boy Nino who collects discarded photos from photo booths.
Narrator: On August 31st at 4:00am Amelie had a dazzling idea. Wherever he was, she would find the box's owner and give him back his treasure. If he was touched, she'd become a regular do-gooder. If not, too bad.
So what’s so great about this weird story? That’s just the point, it weird, its different, but its is very fresh, innocent and clever. The director employs not only the acting skills of the cast but also the cinematography angles and techniques with music to create a fairytale imagery of Amelie's world. I say fairy tale because everything is very life like in this movie yet the mood and ambience are radical and amazing. Amelie presents us a facade of life, which is fleetingly close to us but yet distant because we never choose to look beyond the established norms.
Amélie: [whispering in theater] I like to look for things no one else catches. I hate the way drivers never look at the road in old movies.
The whole film has a yellow tint to it with vibrant colors as red and green to give it a more surreal look. The camera tricks employ zooming and panning from character to character in quick succession, which borrow from comic animations. The director chooses to show us what Amelie is thinking in such a manner that the audience is hooked to her mind rather than her. It is a amazing journey through which director Jean-Pierre Jeunet takes us, but to completely admire this master piece you should have a mindset of an adventurer.
If you like the movie, you will be taken away by it. But if you hate it because its unusual then bad luck, you are missing something beautiful.
It was both heartening and surprising to note that nobody has written a review on this movie
[last lines]
Narrator: September 28th 1997. It is exactly 11am. At the funfair, near the ghost train, the marshmallow twister is twisting. Meanwhile, on a bench in Villette Square, Félix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe. Meanwhile, at the Sacré Coeur, the monks are practicing their backhand. The temperature is 24°C, humidity 70%, atmospheric pressure 999 millibars.
