"Amélie"

The candy-colored French hit from one of the directors of "The City of Lost Children" never lets you forget how charming it is.

By Charles Taylor

Nov. 2, 2001 | If Terry Southern's novel "The Magic Christian" were produced by the folks at the Welcome Wagon, the result might be something like "Amélie." "The Magic Christian" is about a millionaire who uses his money to set up a series of elaborate and vicious practical jokes to demonstrate that everyone has his price. It's a book written for the vengeful adolescent in all of us. "Amélie" is a movie made for the wide-eyed child we'd like to flatter ourselves exists in all of us. The title character (played by Audrey Tautou) is a cafe waitress who takes it upon herself to become a sort of do-gooding practical joker, setting up a series of schemes and pranks that will bring happiness to the people she targets.

"Amélie" has been a phenomenon in France, causing lines around the block and taking in the equivalent of nearly $40 million. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the movie were a big art-house hit here. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who, with Marc Caro, co-directed "Delicatessen" and "The City of Lost Children," "Amélie" is clever and skillful and pleasing to look at. The bright colors are like inviting pieces of candy, and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel has given even the muted browns and dark reds of the interiors a deep, cozy glow. And in many ways "Amélie" is just what audiences seem to crave right now. Who could blame moviegoers for latching onto a picture that's intended as an affirmation of what connects people rather than what divides them, that says it wouldn't kill us to treat each other a little more decently?

The problem is that the charm and good spirits of "Amélie" feel calculated rather than natural. Jeunet has said that, after making "Delicatessen," "The City of Lost Children" and "Alien Resurrection," he wanted to make a movie that wasn't so dark. What links "Amélie" to those movies is that Jeunet is still in love with fantasy and with the trickery that movies are capable of. Amélie herself is a lost child in Paris. The movie opens with flashes of her childhood. We're told that she so craved affection from her cold-fish father, a doctor, that whenever he examined her, her heart would beat uncontrollably, leading him to decide she had a weak ticker and that she should be shielded from excitement by being home-schooled. The doc is all she's left with after her mother is killed in a freak accident, and by the time she moves to Paris as a young woman she's led a very sheltered life. The kicker, of course, is that she winds up in a city where the worldly people she meets -- her co-workers at the cafe and the people in her apartment building -- are just as alone as she is.

It's a recovered bit of childhood fantasy -- a boy's box of childhood treasures that she discovers hidden behind a wall in her flat -- that sends Amélie on her mission. She engineers the box's return to its owner, making him think that fate alone has reunited him with his lost treasures, and observes the happiness it brings him. From there, she's off, playing matchmaker between a surly cafe customer (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, with his pushed-in face and protruding lips, the mug of a pipsqueak tough guy) and the cafe's hypochondriac tobacconist (Isabelle Naty, whose sturdy build stands in comic contrast to her affected sickroom demeanor). Amélie brings a taste of the world's delights to a delicate artist (Michel Robin) who hasn't left his apartment in 20 years, and acts as an avenging angel against a grocer (Urbain Cancellier) who mistreats his sweet, simple-minded assistant. And she makes her concierge (Yolande Moreau) believe that the woman's long-dead philandering husband went to his death in love with her.

The best of Amélie's schemes -- one that appropriates an old urban legend -- is the one that isn't explained until the end. Stealing her father's favorite garden gnome, she arranges for her dad to receive a series of Polaroid snapshots of the gnome at the world's most famous tourist spots. Seeing the hilarious shots of the gnome taking in the Statue of Liberty or the Sphinx, Amélie's father begins to realize what his daughter could never make him acknowledge: the lonely restraints of his own housebound life. When we finally discover how Amélie has managed to get the shots, it's a good payoff. But the real pleasure of the running gag is the loopy notion of a jet-setting garden gnome, happily mailing off holiday snaps.

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