FILM
REVIEW - AMELIE
Amelie, a terrific French film, is a
sheer delight from start to finish, with a very Audrey Hepburn like central performance, by Audrey
Tautau, as the girl who, while living in a semi fantasy dream like
state of mind, brings love to the people around her while afraid to fall in
love herself, until the never in doubt happy ending brings it her way. The film has some great moments of gentle humour, I particularly liked Blubber,
the suicidally depressed goldfish who leaps from his bowl and rolls
under the kitchen washing machine causing his owners a frantic dash to get him
before he can suffocate, being rewarded with his freedom in an
ornamental fish pond for his troubles.
Amelie has a
troubled childhood due to the remoteness and disciplinarian no-nonsense
attitudes of her parents. Her Dad barely communicates with her, other than in a
monthly medical check
up that makes her heart beat faster than usual with joy, but leads him to order
the mother to keep her away from school and other kids because he wrongly suspects a heart defect on her. The Mother teaches her herself, until
her (the mother's) demise, crushed by a suicidal tourist leaping from the roof
of Notre Dame cathedral. The father finally warms to Amelie, and
rescues his garden gnome from the shed where the Mother had sent it because she
hated it, - he puts it on the mother's grave but Amelie rescues
it and sends it round the world from where it mysteriously sends him
photographs of itself by various great monuments. Amelie grows, like Peter Sellars as Chance the Gardener in Being There
into a cheerful girl with an intense degree of curiosity about all. She looks
over a Parisian landscape wondering how many lovers are in orgasm at any minute
- (cue camera roll over various lovers embraces, around town as Amelia whispers
to camera "sixteen" Amelia is struck by the death of Princess Diane
into becoming a saint, and promptly tries to right everyone's love lives
around her, i.e., a woman who is in mourning for a husband who deserted her
years ago for another woman before dying lost forever in a mountaineering
accident, receives a letter forged by Amelie from a post office clerk, claiming
the husband wrote one last letter from the mountain
he died on declaring his love for the abandoned wife.....
Amelie also meets
a man who regularly seeks out abandoned photo booth snapshots, who Amelie loves
from a distance, and leads in a long
complex treasure hunt paper chase towards her heart, only to run off each time
he gets close, until an elderly art teacher tells her to get down
to it before he gives up, which she does. The passport photo collector is
haunted, as Amelie is, by a mysterious figure who's torn up picture comes
up often at various photo booths, and who Amelie believes to be a ghost, until
she meets him, and he turns out to be just the man who fixes broken
photo booth machines ( discarding the test pictures used to check the repair
work - hugely inventive and oozing with natural charm, but I still think Blubber's the best of the many eccentric characters
Arthur Chappell
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