EPEOLATRY

MOVIE 5

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)

Dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

It was Art, I’m inarticulate about how beautiful this movie is. I haven’t seen anything this divine in cinema. I love this film and it’s the best of all times. Now, to the point - it starts with a bee fluttering I don’t know about 50 times ata time and a car runs over it - death … Oh! It’s a post-modern film, Dude! Now, don’t ask me about post-modernism, I’ve already boasted a lot in my review of ‘The Intouchables’. So what does it contribute to ‘The French New Wave’ - Well, it breaks the conventions by i) Amalgamating Realism with Fantasy - i.e. Amelie’s Instamatic photoshoot of Rabbit shaped clouds (Wait! What, It might’ve been an inspiration for Instagram :P), The animals as toys and paintings talk to each other in Amelie’s room, even the quad-photo of a man reveals Amelie’s love to Nino and a blind old-man whom Amelie helps has had an elation like Super-Saiyan, I guess. ii) Breaking the 4th Wall - People directly talk out of the screen to us. iii) Some events are just there for fun or artistic significance that don’t influence the plot.

The critical evaluation has some quotes coming out from them like just ‘A feel good movie of the year’ No! Come on, it’s a great film. Now, Amelie is anti-social right from her childhood and thus she’s introverted but she wishes to help people - once she indirectly attains success she considers her helping nature as some kind of superpower (Well, she’s even dressed as Zorro in some shots) and with that she can establish connections and render justice like a vigilante - okay, that’s too much but she’s involved in altruism and enjoys little things in her life. Now in her childhood Amelie has no-one to play with, eventually her mother dies in an accident in front of her and even the fish in their house was suicidal. So these tragedies and loneliness have led to develop her traits of appreciating small joys and to help people. We see that all the good characters who value stuff are broken in some ways, i.e. we see two flashbacks from childhood a) of Nino, how he was bullied in his class b) of Bretodeau, that he remembers by discovering his lost treasure that how he won a stack full of marbles but was unable to fit it all in his small pockets and the PT teacher is howling his name and whistling - that shows how people get overwhelmed with success if they get it suddenly and much than expected which becomes too difficult to handle, we also see the painter, Dufayel (‘The Glass Man’ as he has bones too brittle) has this great skills of imitating Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Art only because of his condition. Also, Lucien is a very decent guy only to be bullied by his master because he’s slow. Now, that’s how Edmund Burke’s theory of ‘Sublimity’ comes into the picture - it’s after disasters and calamities that one starts to appreciate the little gifts of nature, check out this video for more -

In motifs, we see a video of ‘Tour de France’ where a horse starts running in the race of cyclist and that gives a hint of ‘Amilie v/s the World’. Afterall, the movie is so damn funny, I couldn’t stop laughing anywhere - even the death and tragedies are described funnily - It’s the exact opposite phenomenon of what I saw in the theme of ‘Manchester by the Sea’ it was ‘Brittle Humour’ but here it’s ‘Humourously Brittle’. The movie describes the anxieties of an introvert - Amelie fears her oblivion that she wants to socialize with people but she’d be doomed if she stays the way she is, she wishes to be Mother Teresa for the needy and then has a sudden realization of starting that in her home itself to her father by making the garden gnome disappear to travel places with an air-hostess.

Amelie is the cutest fictional character in the whole damn world. Her each expression is so heart-warming. I’m in eternal love with her (Great work, Audrey Tautou). Everything is so perfect with this movie - the best of Cinematography and Art-Direction, great camerawork by the director, and last but not the least - The Soundtrack of Yann Tiersen - it’s totally classic and so sublime. I can't imagine this movie without the divinity of music, Just loved it. And, this is the best French movie.