Now, in a science-fiction/horror movie about biological nightmares, or a romantic drama about World War I, that's not the most natural fit in the world, which is why neither Alien Resurrection nor A Very Long Engagement can necessarily be defended as unambiguously great cinema (though I've always very much liked the latter film and have come around a great deal on the former). They are garish celebrations of vitality. The thing unifying all of his films made without Caro is that they're populated by elaborately fanciful and quirky characters who nevertheless feel like they could somehow manage to exist in the real world (something that's certainly not true of the fanciful cast of The City of Lost Children), they move through brightly colored spaces at a high energy, and they and the movie containing them always feels profoundly giddy and delighted at the raw possibilities of moviedom. "Carnivalesque" is a lazy word to describe Jeunet's aesthetic, but it has the benefit of being exactly correct. It hits the ground running before even the puckish, detached narration delivered plummily by André Dussolier has found its footing, and it tells us all we ever need to know about Amélie: you're about to watch a carnival in the guise of a romantic comedy about a young Parisian woman doing good deeds. Tiersen's music, which I find utterly beguiling, is jolly, robust, and feels like it belongs under a circus tent in some overheated Epcot Center version of France as foreigners imagine it. In fact, I should underline that again: especially especially the score. At any rate, it is effervescent and cheery maddeningly, toxically cheery, if you're not on its wavelength, and I've always been surprised by the number of people I've met who were absolutely not on that wavelength.Certainly, I can see where the film would become thoroughly enervating if you don't find a way into its style: everything about the design, the dialogue, the acting, and especially the cinematography (by my beloved Bruno Delbonnel this is the movie that put him on the map) and score (by Yann Tiersen) is utterly artificial and unrelenting. It's also true that, compared to Delicatessen (a vicious dark comedy) and The City of Lost Children (a demented Surrealist nightmare), Amélie is vastly more audience-friendly, though I cannot say whether this is because Jeunet was infected by the American film industry, or simply because everything dark and warped in the firs two movies was the responsibility of Caro. Amélie is impossible to have without CGI, which meant something a lot different in 2001 than it means now. That experience, of course,didn't go well for anybody (least of all the audience), but it seems to have been of some use to Jeunet, for his next feature is a pretty perfect hybrid of the delirious fantasies he directed with Marc Caro in the 1990s, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and the glossy high-tech sensibility of a Hollywood production. The movie marked Jeunet's return to France after his abortive one-movie layover in Hollywood, where he caused the frantic, kaleidoscopic Alien Resurrection to happen into the world. Which is absolutely more in line with the movie as it exists out in the wild. A second review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.Ĭoncision is nice and all, but it's hard not to be jealous that in 2001, those of us in the English-speaking world got a movie with the blunt, sensible title Amélie, while in France, where the film was born out of the fertile mind of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, they had the enthusiastic The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain.
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