I thought it was a brilliant movie...I was never a movie-buff and never impressed to hear that so-an-so 'star' sat here etc etc...but it was thrilling for me to be having coffee in the cafe where the movie was filmed, or go to the gardens where she left the album for the guy she liked...anyways I strongly recommend the movie for those who haven't seen it yet. Starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the movie is a rich and imaginative work that delights from the opening credits, a sweet confection that should be savored more than once.
Excerpts from a review by Bob Aulert
"The film starts with Amélie (rhymes with "Family") as a young child, born to a neurotic mother and emotionally distant father. She longs for her father's affection, so much so that her heart races every time he uses his stethoscope to examine her (he's a physician). He diagnoses a heart condition and she's kept away from other human contact. Her mother dies (in a blackly hilarious scene) and she's raised in the countryside until she's old enough to leave home and take a waitress job at the Two Windmills café in Paris. She discovers a tin box hidden at her flat that contains artifacts of a young boy's long-ago childhood. Amélie decides to find its owner and reunite him with the toys of his youth. Thus begins her new part-time job and full-time philosophy: making people happy.
But Amélie's own joy remains elusive. There's no special person in her life. Then she meets Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a clerk in a porno shop. His hobby is collecting discarded picture fragments from automated photo booths and reassembling them in a scrapbook. Amélie is smitten - but just as her father didn’t judge her heart strong enough to withstand the rigors of a "normal" life, neither does she trust that it can bear the demands of love. So her strategies for meeting Nino are as convoluted and intriguing as the means she uses to enhance other peoples' lives and the practical jokes she plays on a local grocer who cruelly demeans his assistant.
"Amélie" presents an idealized Paris, far too sanitized and homogenized to ever pass for the real thing. It's more of a theme park look - a world that you suspect could never exist, but secretly hope could. But don’t let words like magical and charming lead you to dismiss Amélie as a fluffy trifle. It deals with some fundamental human themes: love, loneliness, self-confidence and insecurity. In many ways it's as light and sweet as cotton candy. But unlike the circus confection, its essence will stay with you long after you've enjoyed it."
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