Amélie (2001)

 Amélie (2001), Miramax

The French film "Amélie" (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain) is like a beautifully vivid, wonderfully weird, clever and witty dream.

Audrey Tautou is impossibly gorgeous and talented as the introverted and imaginative Amélie Poulain, a 23-year-old Parisian waitress who prefers to delve into the lives of others rather than contemplate her own lonely existence.

Notes:

Opening scene, Rue Saint Vincent

Narrator:

"On September 3, 1973, a blue fly capable of flapping 70 beats a minute, landed on Saint Vincent Street in Montmarte. At that moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a fifth-floor flat on Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugene Colere erased him from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphael Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amelie Poulain was born."

Amelie's father, Raphael Poulain- "Her father, an ex-army doctor, works at a spa at Enghien Les Bains." Arrows on the screen point out his facial characeristics - (Tight lips, hard heart).

I don't believe in hugs

Amelie's mother, Amandine Poulain- "Amelie's mother, a schoolmistress from Grugeon, has always had shaky nerves." Arrows on the screen point out her facial characteristics- (Facial twitch, weak nerves).

I need a Xanax

"Amelie is six. Like all little girls, she'd like to be hugged by her Daddy. But, he never touches her except for a monthly checkup. The thrill of this rare contact makes her heart beat like a drum. As a result, he thinks she has a heart defect. Declared unfit for school, Amelie is taught by her mother."

"Dad, it's not a heart defect, it's a cry for love"

"Deprived of playmates, slung between a neurotic and an iceberg, Amelie retreats into her imagination."

"I'll just amuse myself with these raspberries"

Blubber, the suicidal goldfish

"Amelie has one friend, Blubber. Alas, the home environment has made Blubber suicidal." Blubber is a goldfish, who jumps out of his bowl and begins flopping around the kitchen floor, which causes Amelie to scream loudly until Blubber is safely returned to his bowl by Amelie's father."Blubber's suicide attempts destroy Mother's nerves. A decision is made." Amelie's mother sets Blubber free into the river, as Amelie looks on, saddened by the loss of her one friend.

Oh, my life

"To comfort Amelie, her mother gives her a used Instamatic." Amelie, standing on a sidewalk, begins taking pictures of clouds that are shaped like animals. Suddenly, two cars crash into each other in front of her, one of the cars belonging to her neighbor. Angry about the accident, her neighbor begins to unload his anger onto Amelie, shouting that her camera causes accidents.

"A neighbor fools her into thinking her camera causes accidents. Having taken pictures all afternoon, Amelie is petrified. She stares at the TV, racked by the guilt of causing a huge fire, two derailments, a jumbo jet crash."

"Holy Christ on a piece of toast, I'm going to kiddie Hell!"

She later realizes her neighbor lied to her, and gets her revenge by messing with his TV while he is trying to watch an important soccer game.

"One day, tragedy strikes. Amandine takes Amelie to Notre Dame to pray for a baby brother. Minutes later, heaven sends, alas, not a baby boy, but Marguerite, a tourist from Quebec, bent on ending her life." As Amelie and her mother walk out of the church, a woman committing suicide jumps from the roof of the church and lands on Almandine. "Amandine dies instantly."

"After her mother's death, Amelie lives alone with her father. His unsociable tendencies increase. He's obsessed with building a miniature shrine to house his wife's ashes. Days, months, and years go by. In such a dead world, Amelie prefers to dream she'll earn enough to leave home."

"Five years later, she's a waitress in Montmarte at the Two Windmills."

Audrey Tautou as Amelie Poulain

 "It's August 29th. In 48 hours, her life change will forever but she doesn't know it yet."

"She lives quietly among her coworkers and regulars. On weekends, Amelie often takes a train to see her father." Amelie asks her father why he doesn't use his retirement money to travel because he's never been anywhere, and he responds that he and her mother wanted to travel when they were younger, but couldn't because of Amelie's heart. And then, "now..." Her father trails off when trying to explain why he doesn't travel now, because he doesn't really have any reasons. Rather than travel, Amelie's father lives in a depressed haze, spending all of his time focusing on the care of a garden gnome that he sits on top of her mother's shrine.

"Alas, this gnome requires all of my attention"

"Some Fridays, Amelie sees a movie."

While sitting in the theater she whispers, "I like looking back at people's faces in the dark. I like noticing details that no one else sees. But I hate it in old movies when drivers don't watch the road."

"Amelie has no boyfriend. She tried once or twice but the results were a letdown. Instead she cultivates a taste for small pleasures: dipping her hand into sacks of grain, cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon, and skipping stones at St. Martin's Canal."

"Creme brulee, here I come!"

Skipping stones, la, la, la

It is evening, and Amelie is in her kitchen. She turns out the lights and gets out a spying glass to watch her neighbor, Raymond Dufayel, paint from her kitchen window.

Raymond Dufayel aka "The Glass Man"

"They call him the Glass Man. He was born with bones as brittle as crystal. All his furniture is padded. A handshake could crush his fingers. He's stayed inside for twenty years."

 Amelie looks out over Paris from a rooftop.

"Time has changed nothing. Amelie still seeks solitude. She amuses herself with silly questions about the world below, such as, 'how many couples are having an orgasm now?'"

The answer is "15"

"Finally, on August 30, 1997, comes the event that changes her life forever." Amelie is in her apartment, listening to the news on the TV when she hears: "Lady Di, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash last night with her companion Dodi Al-Fayed."

Say what?

Amelie is so shocked by what she is hearing that she drops the cap to her perfume bottle and it falls to the floor and crashes into one Amelie's bathroom tiles, slightly dislodging it. When Amelie bends to retrieve the cap, she notices the dislodged tile. She pulls it away to find a tin box hidden inside a hole.

The box is full of various items put there by a little boy 40 years ago.

"On August 31st at 4:00 am, Amelie has a dazzling idea. Wherever he was, she would find the box's owner and give him back his treasure."

Amelie is laying in bed, and in a departure from her usually shy self, decides that she will find the man who hid the box behind the tile as a boy, so that she can return his childhood things to him. She begins asking her neighbors if they remember the family who was living in her apartment in the 1950s. The grocers suggests that Amelie go talk to his mother, who is likely to remember something like that. The grocer's mother tells Amelie that the family she is looking for is "Bretodeau."

Amelie is in a train station when she hears a song playing. She follows the music and sees that it is an old blind man sitting on a bench with a record player in his lap. Amelie puts some change in his cup and then looks to see a man groping underneath a photo booth. It is Nino Quincampoix.

"Don't mind me, just being weird"

"When Amelie lacked playmates, Nino had too many." Flashback to Nino being shoved into a tiny trashcan by his classmates. "Five miles apart, they both dreamed of having a brother and sister to be with all the time."

When Nino looks up and notices Amelie staring down at him, she doesn't have the courage to talk to him and rushes out of the subway station.

Are you falling in love with my weirdness?

The Glass Man aka Raymond, invites Amelie into his apartment to tell her about the Bretodeau family. He gives her an address for Dominique Bretodeau.

Amelie leaves the tin box in a phone booth, and then dials the phone booth as Dominique Bretodeau is walking by, so that he will step into the booth and see the box. Dominique recognizes the box, and when he opens it, the items bring tears to his eyes as childhood memories flood back to him.

"My old junk!"

Dominique sits down at a bar with his tin box, and Amelie is a few seats down. Dominique begins talking about how he has a daughter around Amelie's age that he hasn't spoken to in years. He looks at the tin box and says that he thinks its time he go see his daughter before he himself is in a box. Amelie smiles, seeing that finding the tin box means a lot to this man. She leaves the bar and takes a walk around Paris.

"Amelie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It's a perfect moment. Soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. She breathes deeply. Life is simple and clear."

"A surge of love, an urge to help mankind comes over her." Suddenly, she sees the blind man from the subway, hesitating on the edge of a busy street. Amelie seizes his arm and guides him safely across the street, while she describes to him what she is seeing. The blind man is delighted.

"Let me tell you everything!"

Amelie spots Nino at the train station again, scraping things from the under the same photo booth. She still can't overcome her shyness and talk to him, but when he suddenly takes off running and shouting after a man, she follows him. Nino jumps onto his motorbike to ride after the man's car, and Amelie retrieves a bag from the street that has fallen off of Nino's bike. Inside the bag, Amelie finds a photo album full of ID photos, torn up and discarded by their owners (this is what he has been scraping out from underneath the photo booth), carefully reassembled by Nino.

"Some family album!"

Amelie shows the photo album to Raymond, and they discover that there are several pictures inside of the man that Nino was chasing.

 Amelie is upset with herself for being a coward and not having the courage to talk to Nino, but rather than "fix her own life," she begins interfering secretly in other people's lives, righting wrongs as she sees them.

I'm just going to borrow these...

She steals old letters out of a neighbor's apartment so that she can reconstruct a new "long-lost love letter" from the neighbor's long-lost love. She begins sneaking into the grocer's apartment to mess with his things, in order to gain revenge for Lucien, a nice boy who is treated badly by the grocer. She sets up two lonely people at her cafe, Georgette and Joesph, by telling each one separately that the other fancies them. She steals her father's garden gnome and gives it to her world-traveling friend, asking her to take pictures of the gnome in all of the cities that she visits, and then to mail the pictures back to her father (to inspire him to leave home and travel).

"Europe is awesome, you should try it"

One day when Amelie is passing the photo booth in the train station, she sees that Nino has put up fliers, asking anyone who has found his photo album, to please call him. Amelie takes one of the flyers and heads home. 

"Any normal girl would call the number, meet him, return the album, and see if her dream is viable. It's called a reality check. The last thing Amelie wants."

Amelie stalls for a few days, but eventually decides to give the photo album back. She finds Nino at the Fun Fair, one of the jobs he works, and leaves a note on his bike, telling him what park to meet her in the next day. She's piqued his interest, but she doesn't speak to him at the park. She only slips the album into his bike basket, and then calls him on the pay phone when he comes to retrieve it. When he asks, "who are you?" she tells him "page 51." He opens his photo album and she has left a message asking if he wants to meet her. Nino begins leaving fliers all over the train station and on photo booths asking her "where and when?" Amelie responds by taking a photo of herself masked as Zorro holding a message, and then she rips it up and leaves it under a photo booth for him.

"This girl is a lot of work"

"The Two Windmills at 4 pm"

When Nino shows up at the Two Windmills and sits down to wait for the mysterious Amelie, she is too afraid to talk to him.

"She's definitely going to stand me up again"

Instead of speaking to him, she has one of her co-workers, Gina, slip a note secretly into his pocket, and then Amelie watches as Nino gives up waiting for her and leaves the cafe.

When Amelie does eventually pluck up the courage to talk to Nino when she sees him at the train station, she is literally derailed by a motorized cart pulling cargo in front of her, and by the time it passes, Nino is gone.

Joesph and a failed writer are having a conversation at the bar of the Two Windmills. When Joesph calls the writer a failure to his face, the writer responds, "Ah, yes. Failed writer, failed life. I love the word 'fail.'

"Failure is human destiny. Failure teaches us that life is but a draft, a long rehearsal for a show that will never play."

When Amelie walks into work, Joesph tells her that Gina is with "the man with the plastic bag," (Nino), and Amelie is devastated because she assumes they are on a date.

It turns out that Gina has met up with Nino to investigate whether or not he is a good guy, in order to protect Amelie. She decides that he passes the test.

While she's baking alone in her kitchen, Amelie discovers that she is out of yeast. She begins to daydream about Nino going to the grocer to pick it up for her.

"My hero"

Amelie is pulled out of her reverie by the sound of her cat entering the kitchen, and she begins to cry. Suddenly, her doorbell rings, and Nino's on the other side of the door, calling her name. Amelie approaches the door, but is too afraid to answer it. Nino writes a note, slips it under the door, and leaves. Amelie picks it up and it says, "I'll be back."

Amelie's phone rings, and it's Raymond, who tells her to go to the bedroom and hangs up. Amelie walks into the bedroom, where Raymond has left a video for her to watch. She hits play, and it's Raymond telling her that her bones are not made of glass, and that she can take life's knocks. He tells her that if she lets this chance go by, her heart will become as dry and brittle as his skeleton, and to "Go get him!"

Amelie races to the door to go after Nino, and flings it open to find him standing on the other side of it.

"Oh, there you are"

 They start to give each other little kisses.

 And then they live happily ever after.

 "Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's"

One of my favorite scenes is the bike ride that Amelie and Nino take at the end.

There's something about it that perfectly captures the feeling of falling in love, new romance, happiness and contentment, and that excitement for the future that you feel when you've just begun a new relationship.

At the 2002 Academy Awards, "Amelie" was nominated for Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, and Best Foreign Language Film.

Amélie (2001)
Language: French

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Writers: Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Art Direction: Aline Bonetto

 Cast:

Audrey Tautou- Amelie Poulain

Mathieu Kassovitz- Nino Quincampoix

Jamel Debbouze- Lucien
Serge Merlin- Raymond Dufayel
Claire Maurier- Madame Suzanne
Isabelle Nanty- Georgette
Amelie, aged 6- Flora Guiet