The movie Amélie, whose original name is Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (The fabulous fate of Amélie Poulain), is a comedy directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and was shown for the first time in 2001. Its success has been such that it is the most watched French language film in the world after The Untouchables, so it has become a cult movie. Let's know more details about it.
Summary of the movie
Amélie. Poster detail.
A narrator presents the story of Amélie Poulain, a peculiar woman with a fabulous destiny. Her father, a doctor by profession and not a very affectionate man, is convinced that the girl suffers from a heart problem because her heart races every time he touches her. Therefore, he decides that Amélie be homeschooled with her mother, an occupation teacher and woman with a nervous temperament.
Amélie's mother is crushed to death by a suicidal woman at Notre Dame. Her father withdraws further and confines herself to the care of his wife's small mausoleum in the garden, which he eventually decorates with a gnome.
Deprived of all social contact, the girl Amélie only has to cultivate her imagination and she develops a curious interest in the small details and pleasures of her life.
Amélie and her imaginary friend from her childhood.
Upon becoming a woman, Amélie leaves the house. The little world in his old apartment is made up of Madeleine (the concierge), the fruit bowl Collignon, and his assistant Lucien, the blind beggar who wanders from the subway to the cafe and, especially, his neighbor Raymond Dufayel, a painter with a passion for painting The rowers' lunch of Renoir, whose strange illness earned him the nickname "the man of glass."
The protagonist finds a job at the Los Dos Molinos café. Suzanne, her owner, works with her; Georgette, the tobacco seller hypochondriac and Gina, the waitress. Among her regulars are Joseph, Gina's jealous ex-lover; Hipólito, a failed writer and Philomene, a hostess who usually leaves her cat to Amélie so she can take care of it. They all have something in common with Amélie: the immense loneliness that inhabits them.
An event that will change everything
Amélie finds a treasure.
As she hears the news of Lady Di's death, Amélie drops the cap of a lotion until it hits the skirting board, only to discover that behind the mosaic is a box of memories that some child treasured in other time. Excited, Amélie decides to return the treasure to him.
Sequence: Bretodeau receives the box of memories.
Through delicate and fine stratagems, the only way to get around her shyness, Amélie hands the treasure over to her former owner, Dominique Bredoteau. When she sees her emotion, she decides to dedicate herself to helping others. After all: "It is better to consecrate yourself to others than to a garden gnome," says Amélie.
Amélie, the avenger of good
From that moment on, Amélie is dedicated to helping others fix her life without being noticed, but something seems to be missing. Her neighbor Raymond watches her with concern. For him, Amélie is like the girl with the glass of water in the painting The rowers' lunch of Renoir, whose lost gaze expresses, deep down, a lack of commitment to her own life.
The way to your own happiness
Amélie meets Nino in the photo booth for the second time.Detail of Amélie's burning heart when she falls in love with Nino in her second chance meeting.
Amélie falls in love with Nino, a young man whom she sees twice in the subway rummaging under a photo booth and who accidentally drops an album with a collection of discarded photographs. She now she will have an excuse to look for him: to return her portfolio to him. After successively failing in her stratagems out of fear of her, Amélie gives up until, finally, it will be Nino who goes to meet her.
Film analysis
Whenever a story is told, its protagonist is supposed to undergo a transformation. In the case of the film Amélie (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain), its original title gives us the first sign.
The type of narration
The story is presented by a narrator who knows everything that happens in the plot and in the context, but knows she also what happens in the imagination of the characters, and she participates in the almost surreal symbols of the story.
With this voice in off, the primary story begins on September 3, 1973 at 18 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds, the moment of the fertilization of Amélie Poulain. From that moment on, Amélie's story will be told in chronological order from beginning to end. A first sequence shows us Amélie's creative but solitary little games. With this, the director offers a clearer image of the loneliness of the heroine.
Amélie breaks the fourth wall and looks at the audience in defiance of fiction.
The story of Amélie is hardly interrupted by the list of the singular pleasures of the other characters, as well as by the memories of these that exalt the meaning of the actions. Such memories are always represented in black and white, which contrasts with the film's intense color palette.
In this film, Jean-Pierre Jeunet deliberately breaks with the principle of the fourth wall, typical of stage representation, by interfere with the viewer through direct visual contact of some characters with the camera, as well as through the voice of the storyteller. There will be several opportunities for the actors to address the viewer.
Painting, aesthetics and cinema in Amélie Poulain
Jeunet quotes across the screen the detail of the young woman with the glass of water.
The relationships between cinema and painting have been and are very close since the beginning of it. Amélie Poulain is no exception. The matter can be seen on several levels: in the staging (set design, costumes, palettes); in the plot and in the discursive form. Not in vain, Amélie's universe is located in the heart of Montmartre, the cradle of modern art.
Amélie's room. On the head of her bed and on each side of her are canvases by renowned artists.Juarez Machado: A very special dinner. Square flanking the left side of Amélie's bed.
From the aesthetic point of view, it was the express wish of the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet that each sequence of the film looked like a canvas. In this sense, the film was built on a concept of color inspired by the work of the Brazilian Juárez Machado, who lives in Paris.
Paintings by Juarez Machado with the film's color palettes Amélie.
He applies the vivid colors from Machado's palette, especially red, green and yellow, although he also sometimes uses blue accents (Amélie's lamp). All these colors are applied through saturation and have a symbolic meaning. The red will be the emotional warmth of the character, the green the balance or neutrality, the yellow the joy and euphoria and, finally, the blue as a symbol of sadness.
Jeunet also takes elements of art deco visible in the work of Machado, influenced in turn by the artist Tamara de Lempicka. It also shows the work of the illustrator Michael Sowa, who owns the paintings of the dog and the duck that crown Amélie's bed.
Amélie in search of Bretodeau. Machado's palette can be seen in the scene and in the composition Complete, including hairstyle and wardrobe, you can see the art deco influence of Tamara de Lempicka.Detail of the character's hairstyle.Tamara de Lempicka: Portrait of the Duchess de La Salle.
The film makes reference to other artists and movements, either directly in the scene (such as the paintings that appear in the Amélie's room or Renoir's painting) or through clues that allude to emblematic works or styles that fluctuate in memory collective.
Detailed shot of the release of the Sperm Whale, Amélie's suicidal pet. It recalls the work of impressionist painters on park ponds.
We thus arrive at the second level of the painting's relationship with the film: the plot. Raymond Dufayel is obsessed with the work of the impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, especially with the painting The rowers' lunch, painted in 1881. His obsession has led him to study every detail for twenty years in which he has made twenty identical copies.
Dufayel's doomed study has not allowed him to decipher the latest mystery: the look of the girl with the glass of water, the only character who is not committed to his surroundings. Thus, this painting fulfills a function within the plot of Amélie Poulain. The painting is the detailed and synchronous look on the performance of Amélie, loving and tender, but mysterious, fearful and alien.
Dufayel and Amélie talk about the girl with the glass of water. Note that Amélie performs the same action.
The type of speech he will also apply elements typical of visual codes, although certainly adapted to the cinematographic order. The narrator appears from time to time to stop the development of the plot. It is not a return to a memory (which he does eventually but which we are not going to develop here). Rather, it is a black and white portrait of the character that allows us to make a mental image of her human quality. This portrait does not explain psychological traits directly, but unique details of the character, that is, of her little pleasures.
Like a Renaissance portrait, Jeunet makes the story stop, that is, he suspends the passage of time to present the small pleasure of the character as an attribute that expresses her character. This way of saying is typical of painting, which, because it is spatial and not temporal, stops at an instant in time to show all possible details on the canvas.
Solitude in transformation
Amélie in her room.
Around Amélie, in the heart of Montmartre, the heart of modern art, the breaks of a worn and stuck urban life are shown. The spatial axis is constituted by Amélie's house and her neighbors, the greengrocer, the café, the subway, the amusement park, the sex shop and, of course, her father's house. The heroine of the film walks through each of these spaces, and each one is an expression of the difficulties in relating to the environment.
Amélie projects her needs and concerns onto the other characters. She provides opportunities for transformation for all characters, but fails to address anyone directly. The fear of her is paralyzing, pathological.
As a character, Amélie begins her journey in a state of frustration due to the loneliness that surrounds her. Also, the inability to relate is not only her, but the entire region that surrounds her. However, only she holds the key to transformation thanks to her ability to imagine and dream. Her inner world is her joy.
Amélie and her father in the garden mausoleum, before she steals the gnome.
The narrator is an accomplice to Amélie's gaze, and is capable of giving fantasy the same significant weight of reality. Through the eyes of the main character, we see the relationship difficulties that most of the supporting characters have, whom her Amélie feels she must help out of her prison.
Redeeming love
Certainly, Amélie It is not an apologetic movie. However, we must say that, in our view, Jeunet's film represents love and relationship as a transformative energy that gives meaning to life.
Therefore, it should not be overlooked that this work refers to the death of Lady Di and the figure of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (this refers only once), who died within days of difference. Each of them is a symbol of a different love in the social imagination.
It should also not be overlooked that the only characters to revert to their normal state are Georgette and Joseph. After a fiery romance incited by Amélie, Joseph reverts to his hostile behavior again, which "sickens" Georgette again. It is clear that the transforming force does not arise from mere passion without meaning, but from the personalizing human relationship.
In the movie Amélie, love only knows one opposite: fear. Joseph suffers from this, but also and in a different way, Amélie, who cannot overcome it alone. She needs the personalizing relationship that was denied him in her childhood. She needs to build concrete bonds of affection and trust. That is why her altruistic actions are not enough. In them there is no relationship, but stratagems, as if she were playing to pull the strings of the destiny of others.
That's why every detail in Amélie Poulan counts; that is why the narrator insists on counting them. Recognizing the little details that make people unique are the signs of a caring, constructive, loving, and redemptive relationship. So Amélie used those details to help.
Love leads to good, and this is perceived as fullness: for the writer Hipólito, the good was summarized in being read and taken into account; for the janitor, a loving lie was better than the abyss of heartbreak in which she lay; the good in Dominique Bretodeau could only come from learning to share what she had instead of accumulating treasures; in Amélie's father, good could only open his mind if he stopped calling love to the past that he used as a hiding place. For Dufayel, good would come by deciphering the mystery of the painting and freeing himself from the imitation of Renoir.
If Amélie manages to "save", that is, to transform most of the characters, she herself is not capable of taking the leap. Amélie, who managed to help everyone, cannot help herself. Thus, she will know what is the true center of all salvation: love and relationship. Amélie is rescued from the abyss by her network of friends, to whom she has given so much: Gina, on the one hand, the glass man, on the other. But finally, Nino, who is not afraid of love. At the end of it all, they drive her indirectly or directly, to receive her fabulous destiny.
In a modern life, undone, without vigor and heavy with routine, Jeunet introduces love as the renewing force.
Make it seem like fate
Amélie and Nino ride a scooter through Paris. Final sequence.
The last item worth mentioning is the issue of "destiny." It is understood that in mythical thought, destiny is an inescapable luck moved by mysterious forces. In contrast, in modern times destiny is seen as the result of human actions, simply.
Although in the film Amélie Mysterious forces do not act, through her stratagems the protagonist plays to make the events constructed by good will seem a thing of fate. A touch of magic comes to Bretodeau's life when he receives, without knowing how, the treasure box from him. The same happens with Madeleine when she mysteriously receives the forged letters from her husband that she abandoned him. The same is true of Amélie's career with the blind man and the traveling gnome that troubled her father.
None of them had a hard time believing these pseudo-magical signs. All accepted the mandate of the mystery that was lovingly revealed in each ploy. They were moved by the meaning and not by the rational causes of those events.
Each action for the sake of Amélie, brings back to life magic and faith, the conviction that something more powerful than us happens behind reality apparent, the idea that history also has invisible threads to be followed by means of a fine sense of touch and not by reality apparent. Thus they all met a fabulous destination.
It may interest you: Renoir: the most important works of the impressionist painter
LEADING CAST: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta
PRODUCTION: Claudie Ossard
SCRIPT: Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant
PHOTOGRAPH: Bruno Delbonnel
MUSIC: Yann Tiersen
GENRE: Romantic / Signature Comedy
NATIONALITY: France / Germany
DURATION: 122 min
About Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and editor born on September 3, 1953 in the Loire. He has worked in the film industry from a young age. In addition to the romantic comedy genre explored in Amélie, Jeunet has also developed animation projects, as well as films about dystopias, futuristic worlds, arms trafficking, etc. He has also worked in the world of advertising.
Among his best known filmography we can mention the following:
Delicatessen (1991) co-directed with Marc Caro
The city of lost children (1995), co-directed with Marc Caro
