Amélie Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet Written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant Starring Audrey Tautou and Mathieu Kassovitz Classification: AA Rating: ***
Amélie is a feel-good flick with artsy ambitions -- sentimentality with an aesthetic veneer. That may explain why the movie is all the rage in its native France, why it waltzed away with the People's Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and why it's already generating Oscar buzz, keen to become this year's answer to Chocolat.
In fact, it aims to be a better answer and a superior confection, boosted by a strategy as shrewd as it is simple. Feel-good pix are often a guilty pleasure -- we cringe at the very thing we bask in, all that unalloyed sweetness-and-light. But this one is designed to be risk-free, to deal out the saccharine pleasure while offering the artsiness as an antidote to the residual guilt. That allows us to affix labels like "delightful" and "charming" without any irksome reservation. At least, that's the plan.
And it works, well, like a charm -- until the spell wears off. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet wastes no time putting his inventive stamp on the picture. Breaking a cardinal rule of cinema, the first 15 minutes unfold entirely as voice-over narration. But this stuff is appealingly different.
Instead of literary and languid, the voice-over preface is highly visual and lightning fast. It establishes the strange birth and background of the title character, her peculiar likes and dislikes. It presents the city of Paris in a significant supporting role, with the camera exploring the streets as only a resident can -- past boîtes, down back alleys, into intriguing crannies. And it showcases Jeunet's quirky sense of humour and style -- shot through a filter brightly, with the inserted use of quick flashbacks and newsreel footage and even the occasional burst of animation.
The narration ends, the plot begins, but this beguiling style never lets up -- it's a constant through the rest of the movie. So is Amélie, grown into a twentysomething waitress toiling in a Montmartre eatery. Back in her apartment after a long shift, she happens upon a child's treasure box hidden behind the bathroom wall. Filled with tiny toys and mementos, it was clearly secreted away decades ago by a little boy, part of a family that once occupied her flat. Amélie manages to track down the box's now-middle-aged owner, and, from an unobserved distance, she watches as the man opens the case, whereupon his childhood memories flood forth. He's touched and she's inspired, vowing to take up a life of good deeds, to become "the goddess of the unloved."
What follows takes place over the weekend of Princess Di's fatal crash -- as one mythologized figure dies, another is born. From there, our perky deity goes to work: describing the joyous sights of Paris to a blind man; boosting the self-esteem of an abused grocer's assistant; whisking away the ingrained cynicism of her widowed landlady; encouraging her house-bound father to leave the cocoon; setting up an amorous match between a pair of lonely-hearts in the restaurant. This is an ingenious do-gooder -- her schemes are usually elaborate in design and often amusing in execution. They're fun to watch, precisely because the sentimentality is liberally spiked with humour.
Fun, too, is Audrey Tautou in the title part. With her brown doe-eyes and pageboy do, she plays Amélie as an almost sexless gamine, a kind of Shakespearean sprite flitting through a late-summer's night dream. Yet sprites are catalysts, who emerge unchanged from the reactions they incite. And this is where the film runs into problems, when the plot takes a "Physician, heal thyself" twist and Amélie looks to find her one true love (Mathieu Kassovitz). Her own transformation, from platonic Pollyanna to smitten kitten, is the least interesting of the bunch. At this point, everything that had worked before -- the breathless pacing, the Paris travelogue, the idiosyncratic visuals -- start to outstay their welcome. The charm hasn't completely gone, but it's definitely thinning out, and even a lovely tableau at the climax can't restore the receptive mood.
Jeunet is something of a specialist in fantasies, albeit typically of the darker variety -- the satiric cannibalism of Delicatessen, the monstrous doings of Alien Resurrection. It's refreshing, then, to see him ply his stylistic magic toward a brighter end. Indeed, only the most hardened cynic would argue that all this positive sound and happy fury signify nothing. Nope, what they signify is sweet nothing -- and, while it lasts, that's something.