Love Is a Language Season: Amélie (Dir Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2h3m, 2001)

No season on foreign-language romance films would be complete without a stop in France. The country has, so they'd have you believe, long cornered the market in terms of love itself, its capital has become synonymous with beauty and desire (even if a couple dozen Japanese tourists are sent home every year, unable to cope between the legend and the slightly more earthy truth, and one only has to google "romantic films" to find the French are omni-present here too. What was slightly more difficult was picking one. The beautifully tender Amour (2012), which finds love in old age, despite hardships? Truffaut's iconic Jules et Jim (1962), where a pair of friends are slowly driven apart by their mutual love for the same girl? The equally superb Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)? Or something more urbane and light spirited, like Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglément (2015)?

Of course. It had to be Amélie. Full disclosure here, whilst I love the films of many countries, I fear I cannot celebrate them in their mother tongue-languages, other than English, have never been my forte, but, for the five years I learned French, ever-present was a poster for a film; a smiling young woman, all in red, against a vivid green backdrop. It is here that my love of cinema intersects with my failing, (désolé) with languages, and we talk about the singularly odd career of Jean Pierre Jeunet, the beauty of small things, that indomitable French style, love (inevitably), and one young woman's journey to self discovery, and romance, through selfless actions.

We begin in 1974, with the collection of butterfly-like effects around the conception of one Amélie Poulain (the film's full French title, unfettered by having to be translated into English, remains Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, or: The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain). Born to a duo of eccentrics, with her childhood told in the saturated and often computer graphics-enhanced style that Jeunet is known for, with saturated colours. There are, undeniably, touches of the golden age of Technicolour an the work of Wes Anderson, but topped with a uniqueness that one only finds in Jeunet's work. We are fast-forwarded through her childhood, and despite her lonely childhood, and the sudden and bizarre death of her mother, Amélie grows up to be a sweet, if often selfless figure, taking pleasure in the small moments of her day. This, of course, is about to change.

Jeunet's beginnings in cinema are about as far away from the sweet quiet life of his most famous heroine-beginning his career with comic book artist and fellow film-maker, Marc Caro, so the duo made the bleakly funny and apocalyptic Delicatessen, (1991) where gallio gore and stunning, Gillam-esque (ironic, as the American director brought the film to the States), oddness. Up next, the duo made the fairytale La Cité des enfants perdu (The City of Lost Children, 1995), before the duo were picked to direct the enjoyable, if bloodlessly shlocky, Alien Resurrection (1997). Here the friends parted ways, and Jeunet, somewhat burnt from his experience with the third-worst Alien film, moved back to French cinema, where, to mixed success, he's been ever since.

Amélie, essentially woken from her reverie of cafe shifts, occasional boyfriends, her visits to her distant, now retired father, and occasional good deeds, by the sudden death of Princess Diana, inadvertently discovers a box, within which is a veritable time capsule of the childhood of a boy, decades ago. Vowing to return it to him, she decides that she will continue to do good deeds if the action moves the man, eventually revealled to be "Bretodeau". So begins a treasure hunt in reverse, as Amélie tries to find the owner of the box, and here, Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant's story begins to unfurl its cast of characters, who Amélie finds herself eager to help; it is with these characters, and their problems that the film is strongest.

These range from her landlady, Madeleine (Yolande Moreau), who has never found closure with her lover's death, to the somewhat tragic figure of Raymond, (Serge Merlin), who suffers from brittle bone disease, and seeks solace in his serial copies of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, to her colleagues at the cafe she works, and their regulars. Through Raymond she finds the boy's identity, and eventually, in the best single scene of the film, reunites him with his lost treasures, opening a doorway to memory worthy of Proust himself, which the film effortlessly evokes with its use of stock footage. Indeed, alongside the film's heavy usage of stylistic colour, often saturating backgrounds to the point where it resembles impressionistic paintings or Bande Dessine, it is its usage of footage, or sequences that use the grain of cinema of decades past to depict Amélie's daydreams, a step into the worlds of fantasy.

Amélie is the star of this show-there's something at once superbly innocent about Audrey Tautou's shy waitress, a disarming sense of seeing the good in people-undeniable comparisons could be made to Audrey Hepburn's early films, of the wide eyed, almost otherworldly creature that involves herself in the baser world. She is, undeniably, charming, and it is a charm that practically powers the film, this performance of a remarkable young woman doing remarkable things for those around her, that form the backbone of this film. That this sits side by side with an undeniable mischievousness, a knowing smile that comes and goes across her face, is part of Tautou's genius. For, undeniably, behind that innocence is a knowing, and playful figure, who engages in elaborate schemes for her own amusement and others' enrichment.

Thus, we see Amélie walk a blind man down the street, describing the world around him, see her unravel the love lives of the hypochondriac tobacconist at her cafe, and the churlish and often rude regular. We see her spirit away her father's beloved garden gnome, to have an air hostess friend take pictures of it in exotic climes, to encourage her father to travel. We even see her turn to bizarrely extravagant methods to get revenge on the loud mouthed and domineering greengrocer, and to give her landlady closure. Amélie's adventures, her sweet joy at improving others' lives, is infectious. Were Amélie purely about a woman kindling her love for the world around her, stepping out from an almost painfully sheltered childhood, as it is for much of its runtime, it would be even better for it.

It is, of course, not-and whilst Amélie's turn to find joy and love of her own is undeniably charming-in no small part because her eventual love interest Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), is as brilliantly idiosyncratic as her, a scrap-booking oddball who collects photographs discarded by photo booths, and whose bizarre quest is to find the identity of a balding man who keeps appearing at the booth. The problem is that the film rather forgets, like Amélie herself, about the supporting cast, for the second half of the film, and the romance itself, but, aside from her flights of fantasy,it often feels rather humdrum and ordinary. That their first meeting, a superbly done duo of chases, leaves Amélie with another mystery that the film only solves as an afterthought for their growing romance, is equally frustrating, and, undeniably, leaves the film feeling a little uneven.

Yet, it is the charm of its heroine that wins out-through love, that great cinematic suspender of belief, its undeniably charming and lovable heroine, and its beautiful, idiosyncratic style, Amélie wins hearts because it surrounds the traditional Gallic romance film with a cast of strange, and wonderful figures that help our heroine and act as the perfect conduit for a young woman falling in love with life, and with an equally charming, if quirky young man. Whilst Amélie's central love story may feel a little passé, it is through Tautou, and the film's arresting visual and narrative style, that it wins our hearts.

Rating: Recommended.

 Next time, we're off to Taiwan, as Ang Lee cooks up a hearty tale of a family navigating love and life in Eat Drink Man Woman. Why not start 2023 with a new resolution, by subscribing to my Patreon from just £1/$1.00 (ish) a month? https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond