September 5, 2001
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Amelie
(Miramax Zoe) Rated R
Release Date -November 2, 2001

Last year, I believed that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon could be a true phenomenon.  And despite my sand in the shell irritation of Sony Classics, pushing them to push the film harder, harder, SPC managed to make the magic happen.  As brilliant as Miramax marketing department is, I’m not sure that they can turn the trick on Amelie.  But then again, they did it for the previous highest domestic grossing non-English film, Life is Beautiful.  Amelie is a much better film than Life is Beautiful.  And most importantly, it is a film with a message of love that is every bit as powerful as the Holocaust drama.  So, let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

Amelie tends to defy description, far more so than No Man’s Land.  To call Amelie a grown-up fairy tale would be accurate… and inaccurate.  To say that Amelie is about a gentle, sheltered soul looking for love would be fair… but far too limited a description.   To explain Amelie as a film that reminds us that life is as complicated and funny and, ultimately, as effective as a Rube Goldberg device would be precise… but as vague as confusing as any description could be.

The name of the film says a lot about the film.  I believe that the accurate translation of the title from the original French to English is, “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain.”  The German’s will see “The Fabulous World of Amelie”  And we simple-minded Americans can’t handle more than the simple, “Amelie.”  But all three titles work.  The film is about this woman’s destiny.  It is also a look inside her very personal world view.  And it is a film about this one woman. 

Jeunet is one of the world’s great visualists behind the motion picture camera.  We already knew that.  Delicatessen, which Jeunet co-directed with Marc Caro (no relation to the Chicago Tribune film writer) was an absolute feast.  And their City of Lost Children was so rich that one could barely find the story in the pudding.  Jeunet’s stand-alone debut, Alien Resurrection, was also quite beautiful, despite a mess of a screenplay that made David Fincher’s Alien 3 look positively slick by comparison.  But like Fincher, Jeunet has come off his high profile disaster, returned to his roots, added some perspective on the world and made his best film  (No, I don’t mean The Game.  That film was another stepping stone on Fincher’s road to Fight Club, a film that I believe will, in time, be understood to be as seminal as Kubrck’s A Clockwork Orange.)  Amelie has the heart of Cinema Paradiso, the visual style that combines the best of Vincent Minnelli, Frank Tashlin and Chuck Jones, the toughness of a Noel Coward lyric and the unrelenting kindness of a Spielberg film.