Les Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) - happiness 101

directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet / starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz

My favourite Paris movies, #2

Amelie is a young, naive, introverted woman, leading a simple and secure life in Montmartre, Paris. The death of Princess Diana and the events caused by it change her life forever. And many other lives, too.

I don't know how or what to write about Amelie. Everyone knows the film. Everyone loves it. And if they don't, there's something slightly wrong about them. So I don't think I will write just a regular post, because everyone knows Amelie is the ultimate feel-good film, and that Audrey Tautou is simply wonderful - she practically IS Amelie - and so on.

Instead I'll just make a list of things I love about Amelie. (That's pretty much what my post would have been, anyway.) This of course requires me to watch the film once again while I'm writing the list, which I don't mind at all.

• The opening credits, showing the young Amelie entertaining herself with various, imaginative little ways. I like especially the part above, the strawberry eating.
• Everyone's likes and dislikes.
• The music.
• Amelie photographing the clouds shaped like bunnies and teddy bears.
• Pretty much everything the little Amelie does.
• The grown up Amelie's haircut. And her clothes. And her apartment.
• The café she works in.
• That I've been in the café she works in!
• The way she becomes a regular do-gooder.
• "I'm nobody's little weasel."
• Lucien.
• How they've made Paris look unrealistically romantic and magical. I love the colours of the film.
• The girl with the glass in Glass Man's painting.
• Amelie's good deeds. All of them. Especially the travelling garden gnome. And how she helps the blind man.
• Nino's scrap book and the mystery of the bald man.
• Amelie teaching the evil man next door a lesson.
• "Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's."
• Amelie's pig bedside lamp.

• The wall-shattering toilette sex.
• How she always picks up a good stone when she sees one.
• Ha! Sacre Couer!
• How Amelie once in a while looks right into the camera and smiles.
• Did I mention music already?
• "You'll never be a vegetable. Even artichoces have hearts."
• Amelie's explanations why Nino doesn't show up in time to the café. (He either didn't find the photo or a gang of bank robbers took him hostage, etc.)
• Amelie's collegues and the regular customers. Especially Hipolito, the failed writer.
• The little kisses in the end.
• The happy ending montage.
• How by the end of the film you just have to admit that life is good, dammit.

Towards the end I began to forget I was supposed to be looking for things that make Amelie so damn brilliant. Because I was too concentrated on enjoying that damn brilliance. Ah, the world is an inch better place, once again.


"It's better to help people than a garden gnome."