'My only recipe is sincerity. It doesn't always work, but it's a good start."
That's Jean-Pierre Jeunet, explaining why he decided to make a loopy, fantastically endearing film called Amélie which has sold eight million tickets in his native France and became the great hope for a breakthrough European film in North America.
Amélie -- called, in France, The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain -- has become a must-see film on the festival circuit this past year. Most importantly, Miramax Films paid a half-million for the North American rights and ordered over 100 copies of the film. A French film on 100 U.S. screens is, these days, unheard of (it opens in English Canada on Nov. 9).
"I never imagined it," shrugs Jeunet, who has an unshaven, tough-guy feel. "I just wanted to make a little film for pleasure."
This would represent a seismic change for the man whose first film, Delicatessen, caused great consternation when it came out nine years ago. A black comedy set in a near future when overpopulation makes vegetarians of everybody, it is the tale of a small delicatessen which kills vagrants and runaway kids, serving them up in elegantly butchered cuts.
Jeunet is undeniably a funny man, but funny in the grotesque fashion of people you love to listen to with one foot pointed toward the exit door. "It's true, my past work has made people nervous," he acknowledges.
But even purveyors of Grand Guignol long for a little blue sky every so often, and Jeunet found himself several years ago writing down what he calls "positive anecdotes" and we in North American jargon might call "random acts of kindness."
Usually they had to do with a sudden, crazy desire to neutralize an unkindness visited on another person. Jeunet, for example, says that he has often had the desire to take a blind person by the arm and walk them down the street, describing everything they can't see. "But I never had the nerve to do it."
Little by little, he began to imagine a person who has the nerve to do it. He saw her as a young woman, pretty in a slightly disconcerting way, and absolutely dreadful at picking up social cues. Her ineptness forces her into a reclusive and eccentric life: a little job at a counter in a bar, no boyfriend, and sporadic, slightly weird exchanges with the neighbours.
One day, returning a forgotten package to the man who had lived in her apartment before her, she sees how the memories it unlocks restore his happiness and confidence. She decides to become a Zorro of kindness, secretly solving her neighbours' problems. For the concierge, a woman obsessed with the belief that her husband died hating her, she counterfeits a farewell letter in which he declares undying passion. For the artist downstairs, who obsessively copies a Renoir painting, a videotape of strange events to jog his ebbing creativity.
"I knew people would accuse me of blue-flowering life, of being mignon [saccharine]" says Jeunet, a man whose 5-o'clock shadow would normally discourage any thoughts of mignon at all. "It's hard to talk about goodness today. When Hollywood does so, it's not sincere, it's cloying."
He admits that some of Amélie's endearing habits are actually, harrumph, his own. "For example, when I give somebody a present, I normally hide it and then paint arrows on the floor to lead them to it." You do? "Mais oui. And the kind of crazy thoughts she has, you know, how many people in Paris are having an orgasm right now? I think about that kind of thing all the time."
All this activity serves to mask Amélie's great fear and mistrust of other human beings. She is incapable of intimacy with a man, and when she meets a kindred spirit -- an eccentric named Nino -- she sends him anonymous challenges, promising to reveal herself if he succeeds at them. But, paralyzed with fear, she lets down her end of the deal.
It was this tragic underlying aspect of Amélie which made Jeunet think at first of the British actress Emily Watson to play her. He saw a resemblance between Amélie and the suffering, Christ-like young woman Watson had played in Breaking the Waves. He went so far as to offer her the role, in spite of her imperfect French.
It didn't work out, and Jeunet was at his wit's end until he noticed the picture of 23-year-old actress Audrey Tautou on a poster for the film Vénus Beauté. "The first thing I noticed was that her eyes have enormous pupils. People who see Amélie don't believe them, they've asked me if it's a special effect."
When he met Tautou he found that her personality was as off-kilter as her eyes. "She's bizarre. It's hard to find a girl who is pretty and yet extraordinary."
Actually making the movie was a challenge. All that Jeunet had was a fistful of anecdotes and no story. He decided to break a number of narrative rules in order to make a believable film even though the characters' behaviour owes more to fairy tales than psychology. "For instance, this girl is alone, not even loved by her father. Normally she should be bitter. But instead she is always positive."
Tautou liked the story's improbability, says Jeunet. "French film is generally very realistic these days, and actors get tired of it."
But can this be true? Can the cinema of Godard, Truffaut and Eric Rohmer possibly be called "realist"?
In Jeunet's view, French film took a sharp turn toward banal realism -- and casual violence -- when it began imitating American film about 20 years ago. "Now the success of Amélie has inspired people to be more daring again. I hope we will stop bêtement [stupidly]copying the Americans. We imitate their films very well. But let's not lose our cultural particularity."
He admits that he's also talking about his own personal particularity. "Dreamlike storytelling comes to me easily. When I was a child I fled into my imagination." He also has total recall of everything bizarre which has happened to him -- the kind of things most people forget because they don't quite believe they happened. "For example, the scene in the movie where Amélie happens to be taking a picture when two cars crash, and one of the drivers starts shouting at her that it's her fault because she was taking a picture. Now, that actually happened to me!"
Surely that kind of driver only exists in France -- which takes us back to the point about France's particularity.
He stops to consider that a moment. Then, perhaps remembering that the point of our encounter is to help ensure the film's international success, Jeunet does an about-face.
"All the same, we must remember that the human spirit is the same everywhere. People all like Amélie."