A quarter of a century ago Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, or The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, charmed its way to five Oscar nominations and almost $175 million – a lot of money back then – in box-office receipts.
A uniquely Gallic whimsy, the film goes nowhere in particular as its cutesy heroine beats the streets of a hyperstylised Montmartre, meeting Parisian eccentrics along the way.
Narratively speaking, the plot keeps stopping for Gitanes and cafés crèmes. It falls to the snappy visuals and saturated colours of the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel to energise the meandering material. The arterial reds and surgical greens have lost none of their impact.
At heart it’s the shaggy character study of Amélie Poulain, a shy yet quietly mischievous waitress whose good-hearted interventions in the lives of others form the film’s emotional backbone. It’s a neat trick: the movie’s romantic, Parisian spontaneity is as precisely engineered as the Eiffel Tower.
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Amélie’s first adventure, pre-empted by the unexpected death of Princess Diana, involves the discovery of a hidden box of childhood memorabilia, which she resolves to reunite with its now-fiftysomething owner.
Audrey Tautou brings warmth and fragility to a role originally written for Emily Watson as she careens between matchmaking duties, doe-eyed wistfulness and naughty-step pranksterism.
She sends her father’s garden gnome on a world tour. She visits various older neighbours, including an abandoned wife played by Yolande Moreau, and a brittle-boned artist who reproduces Renoir’s 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party every year. She finds a sanitised love interest in Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), an equally eccentric young man who collects discarded photographs from passport booths.
Re-released and remastered for its 25th anniversary, Amélie has aged well enough. Time has not wearied the stylised, magical and unrecognisably white Paris she inhabits. The characters are moods, not people, although Tautou works wonders within Jeunet’s panopticon. The sets and costumes are exquisitely cartoonish. The relentless quirkiness that won over international audiences remains a particular French flavour, like an andouillette. Except served in improbable rainbow colours.
In cinemas from Friday, April 3rd
