After watching Amelie for the first time, I thought it was the best film of 2001. After viewing it again a second time, with even more appreciation, I have come to believe that it's one of the best films -- ever. And it's French! My God, Who would have believed it?
Amelie is a woman who lives in a fantasy world. Conditioned to behave this way in her childhood -- deprived of playmates, slung between a neurotic mother and an iceberg father -- Amelie prefers to dream, a personality trait that blossoms full-flower in adulthood. Amelie habitually retreats into the private world of her imagination, where she plays, like a lonely child without any friends.
Now, I know what you're thinking: this is another boring movie about family dysfunction and its long-term consequences, The Price of Tides with a French accent. But I'm delighted to inform you that it's not. In fact, it's the very the antithesis of such films. And it's a work of uncommon brilliance for that same reason: it takes Amelie's charming but mildly self-destructive idiosyncrasies -- her tendency to dream and remain an introvert, to `mess up her life' with stratagems, play-acting, and meddling, habits unavoidably formed in the bosom of her family -- and shows how wonderful they are. That's right, wonderful.
Throughout the film, she is helped into the real world by the affectionate counsel of an archetypal `wise old man;' but, along the way, her preference for fantasy over reality is treated with the grace and generosity of a culture that considers human failure inevitable, perhaps even necessary; a culture with the courage to say, simply, `that's life.'
`I love the word fail',' the barroom author says in an important but easily overlooked scene. It's human destiny, he insists. Doing his best `sidewalk Socrates,' he adds: `Life is but a draft, a long rehearsal for a show that will never play.' It's the perfect, ingenious set up for the question facing Amelie: Will she fail, allowing herself to merge with the ebb and flow of universal woe, or will she (through love it's so French!) overcome her common destiny to fail?
I won't spoil it for you. Find out for yourself.
Amelie is a woman who lives in a fantasy world. Conditioned to behave this way in her childhood -- deprived of playmates, slung between a neurotic mother and an iceberg father -- Amelie prefers to dream, a personality trait that blossoms full-flower in adulthood. Amelie habitually retreats into the private world of her imagination, where she plays, like a lonely child without any friends.
Now, I know what you're thinking: this is another boring movie about family dysfunction and its long-term consequences, The Price of Tides with a French accent. But I'm delighted to inform you that it's not. In fact, it's the very the antithesis of such films. And it's a work of uncommon brilliance for that same reason: it takes Amelie's charming but mildly self-destructive idiosyncrasies -- her tendency to dream and remain an introvert, to `mess up her life' with stratagems, play-acting, and meddling, habits unavoidably formed in the bosom of her family -- and shows how wonderful they are. That's right, wonderful.
Throughout the film, she is helped into the real world by the affectionate counsel of an archetypal `wise old man;' but, along the way, her preference for fantasy over reality is treated with the grace and generosity of a culture that considers human failure inevitable, perhaps even necessary; a culture with the courage to say, simply, `that's life.'
`I love the word fail',' the barroom author says in an important but easily overlooked scene. It's human destiny, he insists. Doing his best `sidewalk Socrates,' he adds: `Life is but a draft, a long rehearsal for a show that will never play.' It's the perfect, ingenious set up for the question facing Amelie: Will she fail, allowing herself to merge with the ebb and flow of universal woe, or will she (through love it's so French!) overcome her common destiny to fail?
I won't spoil it for you. Find out for yourself.