Promotional Lines: "She'll change your life."

"This is film is an experience of love,
optimism and wonder for simple things."

"Amelie" is a special film. It is filled with sterling moments
of tenderness and energetic scenes of delight."

Review...

This poignant story, told with humor in a documentary - like style, begins with telling Amelie's past, to explain why she is so "different" in the present story. In a humorous, fast paced unique way, we see her by chance conception; (picture of her father's sperm entering an egg in her mother, and her birth). Her father, a medical doctor, is described as having tight lips, a hard heart and only touched his daughter during her annual physical. Things he liked and things he disliked are briefly shown to the audience. For example, he hated clingy swimming trunks, but enjoyed cleaning out his tool box.

Amelie's mother is described as a nervous, neurotic teacher with facial ticks. Her likes and dislikes were also shown to the audience. Hates to have the skin on her fingers to be wrinkled from the bath water and loves to clean out and organize her purse. The extent of her troubles is shown when Amelie's only friend, a gold fish, tries to commit suicide because of the depressive atmosphere of the home by jumping out of the bowl, wiggling under the stove. Her mother has a melt down and the fish is let go in the near by stream, much to Amelie 's distress.

To comfort Amelie, her mother gives her a used camera. While taking a picture, two cars have a fender bender in front of her on the street. A neighbor makes her feel bad, saying that she caused it with her camera. When she thinks this through she realizes that it wasn't true, and comes up with a clever, humorous way to get back at the neighbor, which shows the audience her own sense of justice.

When Amelie is having her physical examination to enter school, given by her own father, she is so thrilled to be touched by her father, that her heart races, which makes her father think that she has a heart condition, making her unfit for public school. Her mother stays home with her to home school her. This isolates her from other children and she gets no break from her lonely existence, caught between a neurotic mother and an unresponsive father.

Disaster strikes one day when Amelie 's mother takes Amelie to Notre Dame to light candles and pray for another baby. Unfortunately, Amelie 's mother is killed when an unhappy tourist leaps from the highest turret and lands on her in front of Amelie . The rest of her growing up years are now even lonelier.

Then, the story jumps to the present day, where we see that Amelie has grown up to be a pretty 23 year old, and has since moved out of her father's home and has her own flat in Paris. She works at a drink bar, and lives an introverted life in her own dreams and musings, taking joy in the simple things. We again learn of the things she likes and the things she doesn't care for. She likes to skip stones, to look at people's faces during a movie, and peer at her neighbor, Mr. Collignon (Michel Robin) who is known as the glass man, who suffers from a brittle bone condition. He is an invalid that spends his time painting copies of Renoir paintings.

She takes the train once a week to see her father, Raphael Poulain (Rufus), who is pleased to see her, in his own stilted way. On one visit, she finds her father fussing and cleaning his most treasured possession, a ceramic gnome (dwarf), that was given to him by the men when he left the service. He put the gnome in a place of honor in his yard display, vowing to get it refinished with a protective coating before winter.

Things drastically change for Amelie one evening. As she glances at the TV news from her bathroom, she sees the headline that Princess Diane and her boyfriend were killed in a car accident. Shocked, the top of her lotion bottle drops from her hand, and bounces against a tile near the floor of the bathroom. The tile falls down, revealing a hole in the wall. Amelie investigates the hole and finds a little boy's treasure box, that had been hidden for over 50 years.

Thus, she gets the idea of doing good deeds, after her first good deed effort to find the box's owner is successful and emotionally rewarding. In this initial process, she meets her neighbors, when she searched for information. The most important introduction was to Mr. Collignon who not only gave her the correct name and address, but also became her first close friend, which turns out to be a very valuable friendship indeed. This friendship helps her to grow toward being a person who can reach out to find a personal love of her own. The guidance and wisdom of Mr. Collignon gives Amelie the incentive to try to let go of her fear of intimacy and perhaps give love a chance.

She does continue to do a variety of good deeds for others and also plays some jokes on the mean grocer who insults his slow helper. Some involve her neighbors, a blind man, her own father and some people at her work.

The last part of the film shows the rather long cat and mouse game she plays with an unusual young man, Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), which begins after she found and returned his lost photo album to him in an ingenious way so he didn't meet her directly. This mysterious photomaton-image collector becomes intrigued with her as well, and with some help from one of the women that Amelie works with, he is finally able to track her down and find her flat. But, will she find the strength within herself to be able to even let him in the door to her flat, let alone into her heart?

This classic French film won 4 Cesars, not to mention many other awards it received world wide, making it the most successful French film ever to be distributed world-wide. Amelie is described as being like a "magic potion," creatively stirred together by award winning French director /writer /producer Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who won 2 of the film's 4 Cesars.

The imaginative, fun romantic screenplay was a collaboration between Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Guillaume Laurant, who wrote the screenplay and dialogue, based on the personal recollections and partial story written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who filmed this movie in his current neighborhood, Montmartre.

Jean Pierre Jeunet does a superb job in his direction of this unique film, blending comedy with drama, poignant moments, and some well done, dream sequences. His cast of actors and actresses worked well together, and gave some fine performances under his gifted direction.

Audrey Tautou, a French comedic actress, won a Cesar for her wonderful portrayal of Amelie, who over the course of the film expands her ability to relate and reach out to people, to make a difference in their lives and her own as well. The strength of her performance captures the spirit of the screenplay and carries the storyline very nicely.

Mathieu Kassovitz gives a brilliant portrayal of the uniquely "different" Nino Quincampoix, who likes to have an art project using photos in his spare time. His current project when Amelie first saw him, was collecting discarded unwanted photos taken at the automatic photo booths found in the metro and around Paris.

Michel Robin is most enjoyable in his rich portrayal of the insightful, wise Mr. Collignon who cleverly helps Amelie take a reflective look at herself, which encourages her to change the way she feels and lives.

Rufus, a talented actor who has been in several of Jeunet's other films, is very convincing in his portrayal of Amelie's emotionally stilted father, Raphael Poulain, who learns to change a little because of his prized gnome's travels.

One morning, he discovers that his gnome is missing. Soon, he begins to receive in the mail post card pictures of his gnome standing in front of various famous places around the world. Various instances of a mystified Raphael Poulain opening letters from his gnome are sprinkled throughout the story. Near the end of the film, the gnome mysteriously appears back in the garden, with a nice and shiny finish, which puts a new idea into Mr. Poulain's mind.

Child actress, Flora Guiet makes quite a splash in her film debut, playing young 6 year old Amelie in the first part of the film.

Amelie is rated R for sexual content, making it a movie for the over 17 crowd. Some examples: When Amelie at the beginning of the film was musing about how many couples were having orgasms, the film showed 15 amusing short clips of various couples in the throws of passion. There is a rather loud love making scene between the tobacco clerk and a customer in the bathroom of the drink bar, which is pretty funny, but not appropriate for children.