Movie Review: Amelie

By Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

French films have fallen on hard times lately. The industry is stumbling. The local multiplexes are glutted with American action films. The old auteurs such as Robert Bresson are dying. Jerry Lewis may no longer be the choice of 50 million Frenchmen, but neither, for some of them, is Gerard Depardieu.

So "Amelie" is a welcome burst of Gallic good cheer.

If ever a recent French film could be described as an international crowd-pleaser, it's Jean-Pierre Jeunet's new film, a bubbly, charming, madcap romantic comedy played out in the Paris of 1997. Though set mostly in a time of international mourning, right around the days of Princess Diana's demise, it's an amazingly joyous film, a whirligig of fantasy, satire and romance. Staged in the streets of modern Paris, it revolves merrily around a sprightly young mademoiselle who works as a Montmartre waitress and believes in love, voyeurism, anonymous philanthropy and sinfully mean practical jokes.

The film, originally called "The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain," has been a phenomenal critical and commercial hit in France and a lot of that popularity will probably translate here as well. ("Amelie" easily won the "audience favorite" award at the recent Chicago International Film Festival.) It's one of those movies that all but barrages and batters you with its charm and high spirits, leaping like "Zazie dans le Metro" or the early Beatles movies from one exhilarating gag and set piece to another, in scenery so flooded with sunlight and beautifully framed and shot it leaves you a little drunk as you watch it.

This is also the fairytale film France of "The Red Balloon" or some of the early films of Rene Clair and Jean Renoir: both earthy and fantastical, sexy and childlike. Jeunet has been a studio-bound director of nightmarish fantasies like "Delicatessen" and "The City of Lost Children" (and the American sci-fi horror movie "Alien Resurrection"). But here he takes his camera out into the open air of Paris and Montmartre, concocting a bewitching travelogue. He also trains his camera on a ravishing human sight: his star Audrey Tautou, who has perhaps the most ravishing French gamin eyes and irresistible smile since Leslie Caron in the 1950s.

Tautou plays the title character, a French lass blessed with resilience and ingenuity but cursed with a weird upbringing. Her mother, Amandine (Lorella Cravotta), was a bullying, soon-deceased fussbudget, and her cold-handed doctor father, Raphael (Rufus), is so distant that the only time he touched her as a child was during her medical examinations. That's only the first bit of dark comedy that Jeunet mixes with his visual sweetness and light.

As the bemused and omniscient narrator (the excellent Andre Dussolier) informs us in between characterizing all the film's people by cataloguing their likes and dislikes Amelie has been programmed for psychological havoc. But instead of submitting to that unfabulous destiny, she veers off into her private paradise. Finding a long-lost box of a previous tenant's childhood remembrances in her apartment just as Diana's death is being announced on TV, she decides to return it anonymously, embarking on a career of wacky philanthropy and dreamy exploration. More precisely, she turns the world around her into her own little dream: photographing Paris (in a mix, perhaps of Eugene Atget and Diane Arbus), watching people from afar and cooking up little jokes and good deeds that will forever change their lives.

She plays mean tricks on a bullying grocer named Collignon (Urbain Cancellier) and helps the elderly painter Dufayel (Serge Merlin) who lives in a padded apartment and keeps copying Renoirs over and over. She matchmakes for her fellow café workers and falls in love with a Parisian who seems just as bizarre as she is: a wildly energetic guy named Nino Quicampoix (the ubiquitous Matthieu Kassovitz) who dashes around town on his motorbike, retrieving all the discarded and torn I.D. photo sheets from the city's many coin-operated photo booths.

That's all there is to this movie: Girl meets boy amid a gallery of French zanies, with one explosive or graceful gag or set piece after another. You will be either thoroughly charmed or annoyed by this film, but it won't leave you indifferent. Jeunet is a visual stylist of an unusual kind. He's a whimsical master of burlesque and fantasy incapable of shooting a bland or boring frame. Often he suggests a Steven Spielberg with a sharper sense of humor, combining that child's enraptured eye with the flair for adult romance Spielberg has yet to show.

Jeunet's eye and buoyant storytelling keep you watching: the way he and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel train their camera on the parks, trees, waterways, picturesque buildings and curving streets and alleys. But much of the film's immense appeal comes from his youthful star Tautou: her dark eyes and dazzling, warming smile. Winner of the French Oscar (or "Cesar") for her touching ingenue part in last year's "Venus Beauty Institute," Tautou is another of those French belles de jour from Catherine Deneuve to Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche who can lift your spirits and break your heart with a glance.

Here, she's also the centerpiece of a formidable comic gallery of charmers, eye-catchers and grotesques. Kassovitz, whose dark intensity sometimes suggests a French John Turturro (and who, as the director of "Hate," is a prodigious filmmaker as well), is just right for the goofy, obsessed Nino, the perfect screw-loose beau for a daffy sprite like Amelie. Dominique Pinon, the sawed-off hipster troll of "Delicatessen" and "Lost Children" (and, most memorably, of "Diva"), is a fine nasty little customer, Rufus an engagingly addled dad. Merlin exudes delicate eccentricity as the Renoir-copier, and Amelie's café mates (including Isabelle Nanty and Claire Maurier, the mother in Truffaut's "400 Blows") are an attractively neurotic or tenderhearted bunch.

But it's the combo of Jeunet and Tautou that make "Amelie" so distinctive, so spry and intoxicating. "Amelie" wafts us back to the fairy-tale France that once seduced international moviegoers in the days of "Le Million," "The Red Balloon" "Mon Oncle," but it also shows all the things some sexual, some political that now grace the screen since those more innocent days. See it with eyes opened wide and your heart on your sleeve. This is the Paris and the mad, beautiful young Parisienne we look for in dreams.

"Amelie"

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; written by Guillaume Laurant, Jeunet; photographed by Bruno Delbonnel; edited by Herve Schneid; sets designed by Aline Bonetto; music by Yann Tiersen; produced by Claudie Ossard. A Miramax release; opens Friday, Nov. 9. Running time: 2:01. MPAA rating: R (sexual content).

Amelie Poulain Audrey Tautou

Nino Quicampoix Mathieu Kassovitz

Raphael Poulain Rufus

Amandine Poulain Lorella Cravotta

Suzanne Claire Maurier

Old Man Collignon Michel Robin

Joseph Dominique Pinon