Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s debut feature is a formally playful, gorgeously rendered, emotionally impactful adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical novella from 2000. Bring tissues.
Set in late-1960s Japan, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain reimagines an early colonial childhood as a period of intense metaphysical speculation, filtered through the inquiring and tyrannical logic of a toddler who initially believes herself a god. Even chopped vegetables present an adventure.
Born to a Belgian diplomat father and actor mother, Amélie (playfully voiced by Loïse Charpentier) greets the shock of birth with existential alarm – well, she is French – narrating her arrival into light, noise and bodily confinement with dry philosophical wit. “God’s body was a prison,” she laments.
Sure enough, for her first years she remains disengaged from the world, observing silently until a literal and figurative awakening: an earthquake and the equally seismic discovery of Belgian white chocolate. Pleasure and mortal danger collide, kick-starting her initiation into language, appetite and attachment.
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A circumspect script collapses inner life and external reality into an entertaining continuum. Toddler omnipotence reigns. Emotions reshape the environment: moods alter the weather, tantrums bend space, and the sea parts obediently in Amélie’s imagination.
Vallade and Han anchor this subjectivity in a striking visual style that marries European watercolour with Japanese manga traditions. Pretty, pastel-dominated compositions, softened outlines and bleeding colours mirror the heroine’s unstable sense of boundaries.
Central to the story is Amélie’s tender relationship with her Japanese nanny, Nishio-san (Victoria Grobois), who treats the child as an equal. Through Nishio-san, Amélie encounters Japanese language, ritual and history, including the lingering trauma of the second World War.
Nishio-san’s memories of wartime bombing are rendered obliquely through domestic imagery – rice water bursting into flame – translating historical catastrophe into the title character’s small, domestic world. Mari Fukuhara’s soulful score and Rémi Chayé’s arresting artwork add to the sense of discovery.
As Amélie wrestles with death, grief and her own cultural displacement – including the profound shock of discovering she is not Japanese – the film swerves into the certainties of the conscious, adult world without losing its childlike lightness or comic touch.
In cinemas from Friday, February 13th
