Amélie

AMÉLIE

(In French, with English subtitles)

Rating: A

A comedy firing on all cylinders.

Amélie (Audrey Tautou) is a shy girl, who grows up under the guidance of an overprotective father. To cope with her loneliness as a child, she invents imaginary playmates and engages in flights of fantasy. As she becomes an adult, her shyness and isolation remain, and prevent her from approaching the man she's deeply attracted to. And, as we're told at one point, embracing reality is not one of her primary concerns in life.

What sounds like a tragically sad situation is instead transformed into a very funny comedy through the talents of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his co-writer Guillaume Laurant. Amélie's world is peopled by quirky members of the human species, but Jeunet portrays their quirks in a light-hearted fashion without being disdainful. One of the tenants of her apartment building is an elderly painter. Instead of having a clock on his wall, he trains his video camera on the clock on a building across the street so that the time is continuously displayed on his TV screen. Amélie's father dreams of traveling the world, but instead spends his time thinking up reasons why he shouldn't. The man she's after (Mathieu Kassovitz) has a weird hobby of reconstructing torn-up pictures from the local photo machine and placing them in a scrapbook. He and Amélie begin to obsess over one particular man whose image shows up over and over.

Into this slightly skewed world of twisted logic charges Amélie and her good intentions, ever ready to right the perceived wrongs. The majority of the film's laughs derive from the wacky schemes she concocts, and their often humorous results. Perhaps equally funny is the idea that all her plans make perfect sense to her. Along the way, the film treats us to many indescribable moments which seem flippant yet at the same time fascinating, as in one where a horse hurdles a fence and gallops amidst a pack of bicyclists competing in the Tour de France.

Much of the movie's success is due to the casting of Tautou in the lead role. She embodies the type of wide-eyed innocence which makes her character's zaniness believable, yet at the same time we detect an intelligence beneath the surface which makes her the master of her environment. There were several times during the film when I was reminded of Frances O'Connor's character in Mansfield Park, which is a compliment indeed. In short, she's fun to watch, as is the entire film.