Amelie film review

The action soon shifts to the grown-up Amelie, now living away from her father and living and working as a waitress in Montmartre. Still shy and quiet, she works in a café full of romantic intrigue (some excellent support by many of Jeunet's regular players) and retreats to her lonely apartment where again her imagination, as well as the television, are her only soulmates. Looking like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and a grown-up Nathalie Portman from Leon, Audrey Tautou, a relative newcomer to French cinema, delivers a career-defining performance that should spring her to immediate international attention. Fragile, frustrating but also whimsical and daring, Amelie's solitary life is altered by another moment of serendipity: upon hearing the fateful news on television of Princess Diana's death (and there is enough of the death of the princess to make it seem as though Jeunet is making a point about Diana's own isolation), she inadvertently discovers a rusty toy tin belonging to a former inhabitant of her flat. Seizing the opportunity to bring some light into someone's life, she tracks down the owner and his gift is returned: the wonderful benefits of her action are shown at the end of the film.

Determined in her new role as a 'facilitator' for other people's wellbeing, Amelie sets off helping blind people through town, creating harmony in the love lives of her café colleagues and playing the cruellest of tricks on her irritating local grocer. By no means sweetness and light, the last person she thinks about is herself, until another encounter at a passport photo booth opens her own heart for the first time to the idea of love. And really, this is where the plot begins. By the end, this is a weepie, but it is most definitely also a comedy, a drama and occasionally a near tragedy.

It's a rare pleasure to see a film where the parts gel so well that the finished result is so perfect. The camerawork shows a Paris that is vivid and full of extraordinary colours, almost a fairyland where Amelie is the lonely princess without love. The comedy is subversive enough to satisfy the most cynical of tastes and performances all round are first rate. Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poussain, to give the film its original title, is just that: a fabulous, wonderful and uplifting film that will strike a chord the world over.