1. Movie Review - Amelie - FILM REVIEW; Little Miss Sunshine as Urban Sprite - NYTimes.com 4/23/12 9:34 AM
This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
November 2, 2001
FILM REVIEW; Little Miss Sunshine as Urban Sprite
By ELVIS MITCHELL
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's ''Amélie,'' a sugar-rush of a movie, has what could be called meticulous clutter, a placement of
imagery that covers every square centimeter of the screen. Mr. Jeunet's sense of humor gives the movie heart; his real
affection for the medium can be seen in all the funny little curlicues and jottings around the action.
''Amélie'' offers Mr. Jeunet a chance to show some flair without the brittle chill of his previous films like ''Delicatessen''
and ''The City of Lost Children,'' in which his imagination and heartlessness combined for the film version of felonious
assault.
''Amélie'' has a hypnotic sense of romance; it's a fable filled with longing, with a heroine who constantly flirts with
failure. Just because the movie has the reflexes of a predatory animal doesn't mean it lacks a heart. (Or an audience.
The picture is one of the biggest hits ever in France and will probably do well in the United States before its probable
Oscar nomination -- that is, if its American distributor, Miramax, has anything to say about it.)
Mr. Jeunet has made his own Paris through sets and computer-generated art for ''Amélie.'' He and Guillaume Laurant,
with whom he wrote the script, tell the story of Amélie (Audrey Tautou) from her conception through her adult life,
which is filled with the kind of offhand cruelty normally found in the novels of John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut. Her
parents are described as ''a neurotic and an iceberg,'' and part of Amélie's charm is that she is preternaturally
levelheaded and survives her youth with her dark, glowing eyes wide open.
She has the innocent vitality of a silent-film star; with her helmet of gorgeous brunet hair, she is posed to suggest
Louise Brooks from some angles. Mr. Jeunet directs his protagonist so that even when she is a child (played by Flora
Guiet), each thought and impulse shines though her skin. (Ms. Tautou addresses the camera as if she were looking
each viewer right in the eye; she has the cross-hairs focus of a movie star.)
As a grown-up, Amélie, who works as a waitress, tinkers in the lives of her friends. She scampers around like a
woodland sprite, laying out elaborate stunts and practical jokes as payback for those who get on the wrong side of her
buddies. When she falls in love with Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), she can't be direct and let him know how she feels.
Instead, she pulls him into an elaborate courtship dance that turns life in Paris into a game of Twister with a treasure
hunt added to the mix. Nino, mouth agape, trails after Amélie, still the mystery woman to him, as she leaves clues
about herself everywhere.
Mr. Jeunet soaks each frame with sepia and greens. The sepia indicates that ''Amélie'' takes place in a dreamscape
Paris, and the wide-open streets come out of the French films of the 1930's, which already idealized France. The green
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2. Movie Review - Amelie - FILM REVIEW; Little Miss Sunshine as Urban Sprite - NYTimes.com 4/23/12 9:34 AM
gives the picture a trippy atmosphere, as if it had been dunked in absinthe. As a conception, the movie feels so
scrubbed that it is on the sterile side.
And Mr. Kassovitz's presence underscores a pivotal deficit in ''Amélie.'' There are no people of color in this snow-globe
version of Paris, and since Mr. Kassovitz is one of the few French directors to deal with racial tensions in his own work
(the social drama ''Hate''), the lack becomes impossible to ignore. Given that Mr. Jeunet used a black hero in ''Alien:
Resurrection,'' he can't be blind to race. (Michael Haneke's ''Code Inconnu,'' due this month, is a hard-edged
examination of racism in France, and a must.)
In ''Amélie,'' the fastidious complex of flesh and fantasy is a dazzling achievement. It has the impact of Wired magazine
in its earliest days, when every single page looked like a ransom note put together by a kidnapper who had just downed
a six-pack of Mountain Dew.
Mr. Jeunet is not the first French director to deal in pop-abstract terms; Louis Malle's ''Zazie Dans le Métro'' (1959)
was the first influential example of eye-catching zest and was the story of a strong-willed princess-type, a plot point
''Amélie'' shares. Jean-Jacques Beineix's ''Diva'' (1981) was also a stylized tour, a walk through a punk Paris that is now
as quaint as Mr. Jeunet's only-in-the-movies France. He painstakingly creates his urban vision with the same
meticulousness that Amélie's neighbor, the painter Dufayel (Serge Merlin), does stroke-for-stroke recreations of
Renoir paintings. (Dominique Pinon, a Jeunet regular who plays the jealous-guy Joseph in ''Amélie,'' is the shaved-
head punk on the ''Diva'' poster.)
Perhaps after living under a studio's demands for a fourth-in-the-series ''Alien'' sequel, Mr. Jeunet decided to build his
own universe from the ground up. Maybe, too, after the violence -- spiritual and physical -- of his earlier films, he
wanted his latest tale to glisten with optimism. This balletic mix of whimsy and fairy tale could potentially err on the
side of self-infatuation, but Mr. Jeunet moves so fast that the movie never stops to ogle its beautiful reflection.
Mr. Jeunet loves video stimulation. In a single scene, a television shows a man doing back flips while a friendly doggy
runs in place on his stomach, an image replaced by the gospel whirlwind Sister Rosetta Tharpe, twanging her way
through ''Up Above My Head.''
The film's pacing is athletic, though the pulse of the narrative is gradually slowed. By the climax, the movie segues into
a rumination on loss and the perils of being too playful. When Dufayel straightens Amélie out, we see it in a monologue
on videotape. Here Mr. Jeunet uses video as a device to demonstrate how Amélie has kept the world at arm's length,
but the scene evokes ''Krapp's Last Tape''; in close-up, Dufayel resembles Samuel Beckett. By this point, the director
brakes the action so that thought, and possibly regret, can filter through.
The film's original French title was ''Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain,'' and Mr. Jeunet deflates the self-mocking
pomposity of the title by the last third of the movie. Yet there is no denying that ''Amélie'' is, to paraphrase its title,
fabulous.
''Amélie'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes cartoonish violence and
rambunctious coupling.
AMÉLIE
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3. Movie Review - Amelie - FILM REVIEW; Little Miss Sunshine as Urban Sprite - NYTimes.com 4/23/12 9:34 AM
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Guillaume Laurant and Mr. Jeunet;
director of photography, Bruno Delbonnel; edited by Hervé Schneid; music by Yann Tiersen; produced by Claudie
Ossard; released by Miramax Zoë. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: Audrey Tautou (Amélie), Mathieu Kassovitz (Nino Quicampoix), Rufus (Raphael Poulain), Yolande Moreau
(Madeleine Wallace), Arthus de Penguern (Hipolito), Urbain Cancellier (Collignon), Dominique Pinon (Joseph), Serge
Merlin (Dufayel) and Flora Guiet (young Amélie).
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