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Amélie (2001)
7/10
Un peu leger! (Somewhat shallow)
20 November 2004
When this movie first came out, I was still living in Paris, my home town. There was a lot of positive buzz about the movie. As French critiques are usually not tender, I was expecting to see something great. I must say I was disappointed. Point taken, the movie is really pretty and cute, and happily creative. But I was expecting some more depth to it, as any REALLY good comedy should have. The problem with this movie is that it embraces an overly rosy, advertisement-like view of life. There is no question that it succeeds in this exercise, but you get out of there with the numbness of an empty mind.

The aesthetics of the movie is very close to what I consider to be one of the best commercials EVER, namely the 1993 CNP (a French insurance company) TV commercial by Lars von Trier (yes, the one!). That commercial represented a little boy first carrying his violin, then growing older, marrying, having kids, and the next generation, and so on. All the people in the commercial are very happy and the grain and the light and the colors of the movie are strikingly close to those used in Amelie. Also the very alert pace of the action (no time to get bored!) is common between the CNP commercial and Amelie.

Now, why is this comparison a critique for Amelie? As I have said, I consider that commercial to be really wonderful, but AS a commercial. I have no criticism against a commercial being really sleek and cute and happily creative. But a good movie cannot stop there! So if you see Amelie, as I see it, i.e. as a sophisticated version of a commercial, promoting Paris, the happy life and so on, you cannot possibly give it the highest value as a cinematographic work of art. It deserves at most a 7 out of 10.
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Charulata (1964)
A subtle feminist perspective on love and work
20 November 2004
Charulata displays a subtle story about the contradictions facing a cultivated and intelligent - yet idle - woman in a male-dominated society. Charulata's husband is a very rich man, a liberal intellectual and the editor of a journal "The Sentinel", dedicated to the "propagation of the truth". Unfortunately, the husband, though an honest man and an idealist, fails to give enough attention to his wife Charulata. The latter is interested in romantic Bengali literature, not politics. Her intellectual perspective thus clashes with that of her husband, who looks down on literature, and in particular on that literature which relates to love.

Through a unique understated sentimental experience, which forms the core of the movie, Charulata reveals to herself and her husband a power to act on the world. After a series of difficulties that affect her husband's newspaper and her own sentimental self, Charulata finally takes a step forward and proposes to collaborate with her husband. However, the director makes us doubt that love and work can be reconciled by referring to the title of the Tagore literary work the movie is adapted from, the "broken nest".

Contrary to what my comments above may suggest, this is NOT a movie with a heavy and obvious political message. The cinematographic style is thus often reminiscent of Jean Renoir's "Une Partie de Campagne", with, in particular, the use of a swing. The movie has little dialogue and uses the subtlety of symbols and the actors' facial expressions to convey what the characters go through. The characters are the center of the story as individuals, not archetypes, but it is because they are so credible and complex as individuals that they can make us think about universal questions.
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