WhatzUp

Amelie
by Derek Neff

Amelie is as much fun as I’ve had at the movies in a long time: it’s clever, funny, unapologetically romantic, offbeat and more visually exciting than anything Hollywood has been able to come up with in recent months.

The title character, played by the wonderfully charming Audrey Tautou, is a 20-something woman who lives alone, works at a local café and is so afraid of relationships that she pretty much limits them to her co-workers and her grief-addled father. One day, after finding a decades-old box full of a boy’s treasures in her apartment, she tracks down the box’s owner, now a grown man, and watches from a distance as she arranges for him to “find” the box again. Deciding that it’s rather fun to positively affect the lives of others without their knowing, Amelie decides to devote all of her extra time and energy to doing just that. A man who suffers from a bone disorder that keeps him home-bound, a lonely co-worker, a mentally slow produce-seller who suffers the cruelties of his boss: — Amelie makes it her mission to improve all of these people’s lives. But then Amelie discovers a man who might have the power to change her life, and she isn’t sure what to do.

Much of Amelie is narrated by a third-person, omniscient voice who tells us a wealth of private and random facts about Amelie and the people who surround her. Screenwriters Guillaume Laurant and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Jeunet also directs) offer us a kaleidoscopic view of human nature, and their narrated tidbits are so fun (and so funny) we don’t really care whether or not they are, strictly speaking, relevant to the story at hand. (Another recent foreign-language film, Y Tu Mama Tambien, employs a similar narrative technique, with equally brilliant results.)

Visually, the film rattles our expectations at every turn. Full of saturated greens and reds, the camera zooms, zigs, rumbles, tumbles and takes us around a fairy-tale version of the city of Paris in ways that we couldn’t have guessed. Filmmaker Jeunet (City of Lost Children) is a fearless fabulist, an ambitious acrobat of character, story and eye-popping imagery.

Audrey Tautou is a born actress. We’ll be seeing much more of her in coming years, and this is good news indeed. There is something so mischievous, so charmingly eccentric and expressive about Tautou’s face that she could have played her role just as well without any spoken lines. (As a warning to those who dislike foreign films: the lines Tautou does speak are in French, with English subtitles.)