Dysfunction As Quirk: The Weirdo Whimsy of Amélie
Word association: “French film”; “quirky”.
Quick, think! What do you see?
Let me guess: it’s Audrey Tautou in an elfin Wolverine bob, smiling to the camera like a witch with a secret.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001) remains the highest grossing French language film in the U.S, and a regular on undergraduate courses on foreign language cinema. The film exerts a huge pull on people who identify as cinephiles and romantics.
People tend to remember the film as being weird but cute, aesthetically unique, and definitely, definitely “quirky”.
It’s easy to see why: the film is hyper-specific in its photography and exposition. It leads with details, telling Amélie Poulain’s family backstory in random facts and coincidences. As outlined, her mother and father are not really people, but a cluster of traits, likes and dislikes. We learn about the grown-up Amélie, who lives in Montmartre, Paris, like it’s a story she’s telling about herself: the small pleasures she feels at sinking her hand into grain, or cracking the surface of crème brûlée with a spoon, the sort of charming info-nuggets you might find on more creative dating profiles.
The co-workers and neighbours that become subject to Amélie’s good-hearted meddling are fairly broad tropes too: the complaiing hypochondriac, the failed writer, the jealous man, the hermit painter and the one-armed greengrocer’s assistant.
The cinematography is energetic and detail-orientated: rushing close-ups of faces smiling or screaming, small doses of whimsy like a hidden key glowing in a pocket, short fantasy sequences in which our heroine sees her own funeral on TV, the public sobbing in the street.
The faint haze of death disturbs the surface optimism and makes Amélie stand out amongst Western romantic comedies.
Amélie’s childhood is marked by the death of her mother, squashed by a suicidal tourist leaping off the roof of the Notre-Dame. And the plot kicks off on the night Diana Windsor dies in the French tunnel, the dead princess’ face decking the newspapers and magazines of the stand outside the Two Windmills, the cafe where Amélie is a waitress. Her first physical contact with her love interest is in a Ghost Train fairground ride when the man, dressed in a skull and bones jumpsuit, caresses the side of her face.
Supporting characters seem stuck in a kind of death. They are arrested, frozen, captured by in patterns and stories they have accepted about themselves. The landlady still wallows over the cheating husband who died decades ago, insisting Amélie stay for a quick drink she can hear the sorry tale she’s probably told everyone she’s ever met. The old painter from across the way, who paints a new Renoir watercolour year after year, trying to capture the expressions of people who have not been alive for a very long time.
The colour grading coats Paris in the murk of sunken green, yellow and brown. Rom-coms tend to be filmed in open, welcoming lighting–contemporary American studio rom-coms are extremely over-lit–but Amélie is claustrophobic, sickly, frantic.
There is something weary about Amélie’s spirited games, as she punishes the cruel greengrocer, matches up the lonely and pursues the stranger she has fallen in love with. The extended gamesmanship of her romantic treasure hunt chimes with the protracted way American rom-com lovers eventually get together, but, as her painter friend tries to suggest, it’s a strategem of avoidance, a means of insulation. When Amélie is confronted in the cafe by the object of her infatuation, she loses her nerve, and slips him a new clue to keep the game going.
Amélie is quirky film with an anti-quirk philosophy. It is an honest celebration of the “magic of cinema” that also serves as a prompt, and a warning to the audience: the real magic starts when you take the risk, and accept love’s very possible failure.
