An eccentric project of a little-known director with a Hollywood credit to his name, Amélie is all lightness and whimsy and enjoys basking in its own playfulness. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had long wanted to make the film, made sure the balance between its self-mockery and playfulness were just right, so that it pulls off its silliness without seeming arch or preemptive. It tends to humor us as we humor it, inviting us to bask in its knowing but unselfconscious pleasures, like those of walking on a cloudless and sunny beach where gulls caw and drop their occasional feces.
An actress whose puckish appearance of a gamine and small, impish features complement her shyness and self-effacement, Audrey Tautou inhabits the role of Amélie Poulain, guiding us through the digressive, cavorting story as though she had been born to play the role. The story follows her challenges with shyness and her pleasure in the everyday minutiae out of which she makes her life, dwelling in a blithe, almost fey world of her own creation. The plot is serendipity itself, and it picks no bones with this engine of the story: even its characters are in on the madness.
The renowned director of La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz, is among a supporting cast whose many characters are as various as they are outrageous. Playing the love interest of the titular character, Mathieu Kassovitz as Nino Quincampoix is vibrant and reserved, an unnoticed eccentric whom Amélie comes to find irresistible. Beside these two characters, eccentric but indrawn, the cast of the Café des 2 Moulins is riotous and delightful. The romantically vindictive Jospeh, played by Dominique Pinon, is as amusing as his lover-to-be Georgette is derisory. And the pairing of Raymond Dufayel and Lucien (a magnificent one-man act) as the street vendors is often seamless, and only rarely plodding.
What Amélie does so well is that it fashions its own immersive, whimsical world in which its many digressive and serendipitous moments become treasures and surprises, rather than grating distractions. This kaleidoscope of images, reined in by the liberal design of the plot, works with its characters and works in its excesses, so that all the minutiae of this setting of Montmartre remain contrivance, but an artful, sensitive contrivance that knows what it’s doing. This is not life, it seems to say, but don’t we all know it? So goddamn it let’s enjoy it anyhow.
This forthrightness in a movie so simple and so inviting makes it a unique and often moving entertainment. But the strengths of Amélie, all the qualities that make it what it is, are also its weaknesses. Its sunny beckoning to whimsy and its feeling of freefall are its limitations, even if, in this case, nothing more could be demanded.
