Our guide through contemporary Paris is young waitress Amelie Poulain (Audrey Tautou). Born in 1974, she grows up with eccentric parents who home-school her and she develops an active and mischievous imagination to combat her loneliness. After losing her mother at age 8, making her already introverted father yet more withdrawn, she stays there until she moves out at 18 and then lets her imagination run wild and elects to stay single. Then in 1997, startled upon learning of Princess Diana's death, she accidentally finds a box of childhood keepsakes which a boy who inhabited her apartment decades earlier hid there in a hole in one of the walls. Mystified, she now resolves to locate its owner to return it to him, convinced that doing so will make them both happy and decides, if she's correct, she will commit her life to doing random good deeds for others.
I declined to see this for 19 years because for all that time I admittedly assumed it was just another conventional, sickly-sweet rom-com (and having been a 13-year-old boy in 2001 obviously didn't help), but on a whim I watched it on TV on Wednesday night and I was sure as shit wrong because it charmed my socks off. It is adorable, affecting, funny and very whimsical. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (with what rightly became his best-known work) and his co-writer Guillaume Laurant take us on a picaresque, existential and spontaneous romantic adventure with a heroine who, while some will understandably find her infuriating in her rather meddlesome ways, I found hugely engaging and refreshing because she defies every genre stereotype, much like the narrative she propels. In her breakthrough role, Tautou is utterly beguiling, deftly showing an unfailing but sincere and adequately controlled sweetness and innocence with flawless comic timing, and her co-stars all support her competently. It's also breathtakingly designed and visualised; unsurprisingly three of its five Oscar nominations were in technical categories (Art Direction, Cinematography and Sound; it was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Original Screenplay).
So it's safe to say you can colour me judgmental and disproven here. Because Amelie is absolutely enchanting from beginning to end.
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