Amélie from Montmartre

A movie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

With Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Clothilde Mollet, Claire Maurier and others

Monika says:

Amélie grows up completely isolated from other children because her father, a former doctor in the military, erroneously supposes she has a cardiac defect and doesn’t allow her to go to school. The "cardiac defect", however, is only the excitement Amélie feels when her father touches her at her monthly check up, something he otherwise never does. Creative Amélie dreams up her own fantasy world to make up for the lack of friends and wishes for a brother.

She grows up to be a dreamy young woman (Audrey Tautou) who hasn’t quite left behind the fantasy world of her childhood. She works as a waitress in a bistro where she tries to set up her colleague with one of the guests, ignoring the fact that Cupid’s arrow has already found its target. A strange photo album she found in the street that belongs to shy and lonely Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) and the treasure chest of an unknown little boy she discovers by chance in her own bathroom slowly pave the way for her to the "real" world.

Most of us now and then retreated into a world of our own as children and imagined things an uninitiated would find completely absurd but that made sense to us. Jean-Pierre Jeunet based a charming movie on this idea. It’s impossible not to like the heroes of this modern day fairy tale. Even Amélie’s grown-up world is full of eccentric characters, e. g. the man who regularly has his picture taken at the railway station and always throws the pictures away, or Nino who as a hobby picks up the pictures others tore and threw out and lovingly puts them together in an album, apparently hoping to learn something about the people in the pictures he doesn’t have the courage to talk to. In the end he – and the unsuspecting audience – find out that nothing is as mysterious as it seemed at first. It is obvious that Amélie and Nino have to find each other eventually somewhere, but even if Jeunet’s story is banal, it is never boring. AMÉLIE FROM MONTMARTRE is a unique movie, a jewel you don’t want to miss.

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Monika Hübner

Last changes: 09/05/04