Amelie | | Cast : | Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz | | Director : | Jean-Pierre Jeunet | | Studio : | Miramax Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | January 01, 2001 | | DVD Released Date : | December , 2002 | | Language : | French (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 14, 2005 | | Summary | an author and director's artificial fantasy so far from real love in the real world | Content
 | I would have loved this movie without Amelie. I would love a love story or a drama about the real often middle aged or older people in this movie confronting their lives and their loves and their pain, and finding something to sustain themselves in the real grind of life, not in the actions of an ignorant girl with no respect for other people.
This is a very artificial movie. It dresses itself up in supposed quirkiness, it claims to be romantic but it is not about what real love or even friendship is about, real people knowing each other, liking each other, sharing their humanity, real people living in life.
Essentially, the character Amelie is a person with no social skills, no real friends, and no experience in life or love, and little desire. Yet, she sets herself up with no experience to disturb the happiness and pattern of other people by lying, trying to fix people up with others who are not really interested in each other, and theft. She steals precious letters from her father to fabricate lies for her concierge--is it an emotional problem you cant be more faithful to your father than to a stranger.
The character Amelie really has not respect or faith in the humanity of other people. She only sees them as good or bad, and from a position of ignorance of life breaks into people's homes and steals things, doctor's people's food and medical supplies to cause them wrong, etc. etc. All of this without trying to find out why people feel the way she does, even though her own life from conception is treated with understanding and explanation for her supposed pain.
Amelie ultimately falls in love with a man whose work she steals for a period of time and does not seriously, promptly or courteously attempt to return to him. Instead, she ferrets out the secrets of his work, and then forces him to go through all kinds of twists and turns and running and climbing up and down hills that would cause a normal person a heart attack.
For what? She doesn't know him. Nothing meaningful is revealed in his work but obsession. What does she love, a person? Or is it that this movie is supposed to be a love story but the author and directors don't know how to talk about real love and real life, so they artificially produce it give this film a plot, when it really has not much of one.
At the close of the movie, he comes to her house, she prevents him from speaking to her--having seen him once or twice without saying anything--and they make love. Then they are seem going through Paris on her motorbike, her father, despite the purloined letters of his love being stolen, decides to travel the world which never has done before, etc.
This movie is nothing but the fantasy of the author and director that isolates love and happiness from real life. A character is created who in essence has no life--curiously before she does all this she is shown not to be interested in boy friends and romance--and no real aspirations. We learn, a bit surprised, that she just wants love in the abstract or so we are told after being told that she doesn't. Nothing really convinces her that she should. The film simply relies on the fact that we are inserted in a discourse of realizing that movies with attractive young women are love stories. The assumption is that completion in life for women is only love with a hunking handsome moveie actor type of man. We note all other men except the lover she choses without hearing or speaking a word to him are middle aged or disfigured or ancient. Her treatment of other people really ranges from the greatest rudeness and manipulation to crime. I have always thought love involved accepting the humanity of others and realizing that your own humanity can be share with them.
Real people struggling to make a real living, real people with quirks and imperfections, real people who do not look as classically beautiful--but dressed unfashionably and "quirky" as the costume designer for the film wishes--who are really beset with making a real living-are belittled, persecuted, or given the drastic surgery by crime or abuse that Amelie seems to carry out. No one who has known the Paris neighborhood Amelie lives in can figure out how she can live in such an apartment, in such a building, on a waitress's tips.
The film seems romantic, but it really exports romance outside of real life. The character seems sympathetic, only because she has no real life; none of the real desires needs, ambitions and wants that real people have. Her actions as some beneficent match maker and changer of trouble people's life in the real world would be better replaced with an ability to learn about the pain that people who have had more life and reality have.
She finds her father's letters of passion for his mother while he was away in the army. Instead of cutting them up and using them to falsify that a philanderer didn't desert her concierge, she should have revisited her view of her mother and late father whom she has remembered as cold and cruel as once being a woman of passion and a man filled with poetry and fire of love. Shouldn't she want to talk to her father about this, treat him differently, respect him as she has not to this point. Indeed who in the world does Amelie respect?
See this movie as a low level fantasy for childish thoughts, rather than the deep arty romantic movie it attempts to be. Instead, it is someone's fantasy that sees love as alienated for real life. That is sadness.
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| Rating | | | Date | August 12, 2005 | | Summary | She gets it! | Content
| Fun-Fun-Fun. You will have tickles, laughs, rolling around fun with this one. She may never get a part as well suited, he may never get anything again, but they work in Amelie. I've seen it more time than I can remember and find new thing to see in every scene. Watch what is happening in the background after you have seen the movie a few times, there is a second film back there. |
| Rating | | | Date | August 12, 2005 | | Summary | Director Talks Over Entire Movie | Content
| Great movie - but the director talked over the entire movie. I could not get the director to keep quiet. why do i need to hear the director talk over the whole movie? |
| Rating | | | Date | August 05, 2005 | | Summary | One of the delightfully quirky movies I've seen in awhile | Content
| It's kind of hard to tell sometimes whether a movie is trying to be too indie and smart for it's own good, or whether the movie is just charming and likable without trying to do so all along. With Amelie, there's a feeling of charm running throughout the entire thing but without feeling pre-fabricated. Jean Pierre Jeunet(he directed the awful Alien Resurrection but did do Delicatessen) made a film that shows there is still genuine filmmakers behind the camera.
Amelie is a single waitress surrounded by people who need some life fixing. She finds an old box that the previous tenant from decades ago left and she decides to return it to him. This then sparks an idea to start wanting to do good to everyone else. A creepy man and a waitress get together, her widowed father who never travels lives through a garden gnome who is getting photos taken at various European sites. And there's plenty more.
However she finds that her life needs some tending to as well, so enter an odd man who collects torn up photographs from those instant photo booths. Only instead of doing what others would do which is just to go up to him and talk, she takes him through a series of mini-adventures(such as a humoress one where he follows painted blue arrows only to have to run back).
There's CG in the film but it's not as instrusive as one might expect. She's got a cool little pig lamp that turns itself off, photos talk back to a guy(similar in a way to Harry Potter photos), paintings converse and Amelie turns into a puddle. It's also gorgeously shot. One of my favorite shots is where she skips stones near a waterfall/dam and the camera arcs from above the waterfall to the other side just above the water. Another part of the film's charm is its star, Audrey Tautou. Like Audrey Hepburn, she's got a lovable quality where you can't help but want to watch her.
If you actually start thinking of its length, it might feel long but if you really get into the film, it just flies by. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 30, 2005 | | Summary | Quirky Amélie wonderful and charming... | Content
| With her regular job waiting tables in a small café, Amélie doesn't have much money. But, it is her creative imagination that makes her so wealthy! She uses her wonderful mind to successfully clean up the mess in other people's lives. When her widowed father refuses to travel and see the world, choosing to stay and tend his garden with his prized plaster Garden Gnome, Amélie takes action. She abducts the gnome and sends it around the world, having its picture taken in front of the world sights her Dad will never see. The photos are all sent to the father. Eventually, it becomes clear that Amélie's life itself is in need of a bit of cleaning... She needs a loving relationship. But, who could ever love the creative mind of Amélie?
This French film is totally charming and a celebration of a beautiful mind. Wonderfully directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it shows a world that only Amélie herself could dream up. The overall characterization of the young girl has much in common with Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, both sharing scheming smiles and a wink with the viewer. The film also shares a wonderful musical score that makes the journey all the more enjoyable. Amélie is an angel of sorts. And this film follows her around to see how she effects other lives.
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