Susan Granger’s review of “AMELIE” (Miramax Zoe)
As France’s official entry into the Foreign Film Oscar race, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic comedy stars Audrey Tautou as Amelie, a shy, soft-spoken waitress at the Two Windmills cafe in Montmartre who puts her own love life on hold as she orchestrates the lives of those around her. Raised by her physician father after her mother was killed by a tourist plummeting off Notre Dame Cathedral, Amelie is a lonely, aloof young woman who uses her imagination as a prism to explore the world. One day, behind a bathroom wall in her apartment, she discovers a small box of childhood toys that belong to the boy who lived there many years ago. Fascinated, she decides to return it to its rightful owner and, in watching his delight from afar, she gradually becomes more bold and out-going, concocting devious schemes to good deeds wherever she can – like altering the greengrocer’s bad attitude, launching her father on a world tour, and match-making. Pivotal to the change in her life is her love for Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a clerk in a sex shop who collects and reassembles tiny shreds of discarded photo machine snapshots. Director/writer Jeunet (“Delicatessen,” “City of Lost Children,” “Alien: Resurrection”) and co-writer Guillaume Laurant put a wry, fantastical, visually stylish spin on the old boy-meets-girl story, and the emotional delicacy of Audrey Tautou’s exquisite Amelie could be compared with Audrey Hepburn’s waifish Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” while director Mathieu Kassovitz (“Hate”) proves himself to be a sweetly offbeat, sexy actor. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Amelie” is a frothy, funny, fanciful 10, a dazzling holiday confection. “Times are hard for dreamers,” someone says, and perhaps that’s what makes the joie de vivre of “Amelie” so timely.
