The year it came out I was finishing high school and had a summer job working at Blockbuster Video. That job had one meaningful perk: I could bring home ten films a week. I used that allowance aggressively. Amélie was one of the ones I kept returning to, checking it out over and over from the DVD shelf, which is either a testament to how good it is or a sign that I had a lot of evenings to fill. Probably both.
Amélie is twenty-five years old this year, and it is available on Amazon Prime in Canada right now. If it’s been a while, or if you’ve somehow never seen it, add it to your list.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film follows Amélie Poulain, a shy, imaginative waitress in Montmartre who discovers a hidden box of childhood mementos belonging to a stranger. She has to decide if returning it will make him happy, or to devote herself to quietly improving the lives of everyone around her. She is a one-woman intervention programme operating entirely in secret: she engineers small romances, delivers closure, plays elaborate tricks on people who deserve them, and sends her father’s garden gnome on a world tour via a flight attendant friend, documented in photographs from international landmarks.
The visual language of it holds up. Paris is brought to life with amber and green and red tones, saturated and dreamy. A version of Montmartre that feels like a memory of a place rather than the place itself. The Café des 2 Moulins is real, and apparently fans stole the chairs for years after the film came out, which feels exactly right. The score is one of those pieces of music that lives permanently in your brain once it’s in there – the ultimate ear worm. The accordion. You know the one.
Audrey Tautou is extraordinary in it. Amélie barely speaks directly to anyone for much of the film. Her interior life is enormous and her outer life is almost deliberately small, and Tautou makes that gap both funny and genuinely moving. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay, and won four Césars including Best Film. It is still the highest-grossing French-language film ever released in North America.
What I didn’t appreciate at seventeen was how precisely the film is actually about loneliness. Not the sad, grey, and teary kind. The kind that sits alongside imagination and humour and a full introverted life, that is its own complete world and also, at some point, not quite enough. Amélie would rather orchestrate other people’s happiness than risk her own. Most of us know that feeling, even if we’ve never done it quite so elaborately or with quite as good a soundtrack.
If you’re scrolling through your subs and pass this one, watch it again. You won’t regret it.