Get ready to crack your crème brùlée crusts – Amélie is back. The beloved French love story and unprecedented international sensation returns to cinemas this Valentine’s Day for a limited re-release, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Now, a new generation will be introduced to Amélie Poulain, but does the film’s wide-eyed notions on love and life hold up two decades later? In this editorial, Geek Vibes Nation Senior Critic Larry Fried observes the film’s original success and how director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s vision both shines and shrivels when applied through a modern lens.
The world was a very different place when Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie first screened in North America. It was part of the Toronto International Film Festival, where close to 950 people had packed the now-demolished seats of the Uptown Theatre to witness Jeunet’s auteurist return to form following the failed Alien: Resurrection. The film’s thrilling box office run in its home country (and snub from said home country’s most prestigious film festival) had generated a hype unlike many other films at the festival that year, culminating with a bombastic premiere screening. The audience burst with laughter and joy right at the onset, having fully given into the charms of Amélie Poulain and Jeunet’s madcap comic sensibilities. As the film ended, positive People’s Choice Award ballots piling on top of one another – the film would win the award days later – buzz rang through the air like a magic spell. It was one of those rare film festival moments, when the novelty of discovery cosmically collides with an excitable audience and an exciting work of storytelling. For an evening, much like the ending of Amélie, all felt right with the world.
That was September 10th, 2001. The following day, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and nothing was the same. The festival canceled its red carpets and gala parties, though the films played on, and chaos swept over Toronto and its many New York-bred visitors. You would think an event of this magnitude would snuff out the light of the prior evening, and it did, but only momentarily. Against all odds, Amélie rolled out globally, including a limited run in America beginning in November, and wound up becoming one of the highest-grossing films of the year. It went on to win four Césars, two BAFTAs, top prize at the European Film Awards, and – perhaps its most unprecedented honor – five Oscar nominations, including in categories that rarely feature non-English language films: Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Sound.
In hindsight, it’s clear why a film built on acts of kindness captured the consciousness of a world struck by immense grief and tragedy. Ask anyone in New York how it felt following the events of 9/11 and they’ll tell you a spirit of brotherhood was in the air. People began looking out for each other, connecting in a way that defied the city’s air of hustle and bustle. Though Amélie’s thoughtfulness is shrouded in secrecy, hiding her madcap methods like some kind of pixie vigilante, she is driven to provide her colorful neighbors and co-workers with joy and happiness amidst life’s doldrums and disappointments. Her story was an antidote that set people’s hearts aflutter, anchored by a quirky romance that made you believe in love.
22 years later, Amélie remains in the upper echelon of international cinema. Beyond remaining one of the highest-grossing non-English language films in the United States, its iconic green poster, mesmerizing Yann Tiersen score, and bubbly lead performance from Audrey Tautou have kept it in the cultural consciousness. It isn’t merely a cult hit with cinephiles (though it remains so with a 4.2 Letterboxd score and over 190K five-star rankings), but considered one of the greatest romances of all time in the world of film discourse. Now, it’s back in theaters as a 2024 Valentine’s Day treat, thanks to Sony Pictures Classics newly purchasing the distribution rights. This would suggest there is more to the film’s appeal than its timeliness upon release, yet this critic’s first experience seeing it in 2024 revealed that appeal to be elusive.
There is, of course, much to enjoy about the film, starting from its opening moments. Narrated with a matter-of-fact, offbeat imagination that feels right at home with other filmmakers dominating independent film today like Wes Anderson or Yorgos Lanthimos, Amélie begins by detailing its eponymous protagonist’s childhood and the little things in life that keep her sheltered, neurotic parents at bay. Jeunet and co-writer Guillaume Laurant have an immediately singular story to tell, colored by quirks and details that are as outlandish as they are charming. Evocative camerawork and lush colors convey the story in a heightened manner that blends the humorous and the horrifying; the first 15 minutes alone contain two depictions of suicide, one cartoonish (Amélie’s pet fish) and one striking (a random woman falls on top of Amélie’s mother, ending both of their lives).
Just as Amélie inherits her parents’ isolationist outlook and love of uniquely small pleasures, so too does the rest of the film continue to push Jeunet’s striking juxtapositions. One of the film’s highlights, a hardcore off-screen bathroom hookup that shakes the shelves of a humble Parisian cafe, is played for laughs as Amélie’s adorable smile brims widely. Nino’s innocent pining for his mysterious admirer, secretly Amélie, is discussed in a sex shop with colorful dildos lining the walls. In one moment, Amélie is running in low frame rate, and in the next moment, she’s melting onto a tile floor. Jeunet’s tonal dexterity is what makes Amélie a thoroughly entertaining, if somewhat stupefying movie, filled with an unbridled kookiness that makes it easy to understand why the film took the world by storm in the first place.
However, underneath these aesthetic pleasures, there lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, fittingly. The film’s detractors call it “style over substance,” but that feels too basic a definition. After all, there is something moving about Amélie’s good-natured quest, even if it feels unmotivated. After she finds a box of vintage trinkets hiding inside the wall of her apartment (bizarrely prompted by the death of Princess Diana, a cultural detail that merits little metaphorical value on a first watch), Amélie suddenly decides that it would be a good idea to track down the box’s original owner and return the keepsakes to him. It’s a nice thought and a strong catalyst for the plot, but little of what we’ve seen up to this point suggests Amélie would have any interest in accomplishing such a task. She has barely engaged with other people beyond daily surface-level interactions, including her two co-workers and a local grocery assistant, Lucien, to whom she is vaguely shown to have an attraction despite there being a wholly separate love interest introduced later in the film.
So why does she decide to pursue being a “do-gooder?” Amélie is unsatisfied with her life, though this too is defined in only the most basic terms. Her parents certainly failed to provide the physical intimacy and positive reinforcement that any healthy child needs to grow up emotionally stable, but Amélie’s decision to move out of her home and find a job in the city proves she has already overcome these obstacles. She’s still introverted, sure, but still finds pleasure in life and even enough success to afford a cozy apartment near her work. Whatever dire need she is addressing, it isn’t especially clear and certainly not compelling.
Perhaps there is little connective tissue in the text of the movie because Jeunet hoped (see: knew) that audiences would be able to latch onto the naivete of the character on goodwill alone. Amélie is not exactly a movie that asks for the audience’s permission, rather it moves at such a confident clip that enthralls the viewer, taking them along for the ride with no room for questions to be asked. When Amélie discovers the box of trinkets, it is yet another charming piece of the film’s larger puzzle, not a plot point to be analyzed; the absurdity and, thus, lack of logic behind its inclusion is a feature, not a bug. The audience’s heartstrings are tugged by the nostalgia of the box, a relatable sentiment we all feel when rediscovering old relics of our past, and we are strung along to the beat of Amélie’s do-gooder drum, even if there’s little in the story to have inspired it. The majority of the film functions on this more emotional logic.
The adverse effect of this is, of course, that looking for too much deeper meaning will merit limited results. This is most glaringly obvious in the film’s central romance between Amélie and Nino. The two first meet in the subway station, where Amélie approaches Nino scraping the bottom of a photo booth for leftover ID portraits. There appears to be a subliminal connection between them, two troubled children who remain off the beaten path into their adulthoods. Amélie, however, can’t work up the nerve to say anything and flees. She encounters him again in the subway station, however, Nino initially ignores her for a man across the station he attempts to catch up with. He drops a case in the chase, which Amélie picks up and uses to mount her own wild goose chase to get Nino’s attention. It’s all very cute, lit with the kind of whimsy that any beloved romcom has infused into its bones. However, after the third or fourth scene of no substantial interaction, you begin to wonder on what any of this is actually built.
Amélie’s attraction to Nino is not hard to decipher – his “oddball” interest in scrapbooking forgotten ID photos strikes Amélie as a product of his interest in people and connecting with them, something they share. Also, simply put, he’s a good-looking guy, and Amélie wants him. Jeunet takes pride in his films subverting their own silliness with a dash of reality; Amélie, despite her manic pixie design, is far from innocent or even asexual. This is displayed in one especially loaded scene, where Amélie tracks Nino to a carnival where he works as a costumed character in a spooky tunnel ride. The two share an intimate moment of closeness as the ride’s gloomy thrums and haunted, smoky atmosphere are transformed into a guttural expression of their desire (this is one of the film’s best moments and one of Jeunet’s most impressive juxtapositions).
However, for all that Amélie brings to the table, it never feels expressly clear what Nino sees in her. The initial spark between the two of them feels incredibly muted and the two spend little time further interacting on screen beyond coded notes and phone calls, so there’s no chemistry to gauge their relationship. In fact, Nino himself feels like a blank slate as a character, somewhat quirky but nowhere near as actually neurotic as Amélie. Their romance, though adorable, doesn’t feel weighted in anything palpably emotional. Their connection is, as the film even admits, incredibly spiritual and, thus, ineffable. That’s also what love is, and anyone who has experienced love can immediately find themselves emotionally intertwined with these two lovebirds despite the will-they/won’t-they of it all. Another core element of the film – though notably imbalanced with the rest of the ensemble – is built on an emotional logic. You either catch the drift or miss the boat.
Photographer: Bruno Delbonnel. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The film’s initial success post 9/11 came from its reliance on this emotional logic, that the audience would fill in the blanks for themselves in the wake of unspeakable tragedy and be lifted by the film’s positivity and honest-to-god romance. In 2024, the world continues to reel from tragedy, although to a more disconnected degree. The rapid rise of the internet led to the widespread normalization of online dating and dating apps, slowly killing the kind of love at first sight that Amélie hinges on. The 2016 election and its subsequent fallout set the world ablaze, figuratively and somewhat literally, leaving a hyper-connected, hyper-self-aware world fully aware of its devastating systemic and structural problems that feel too big to fix. Amélie is, in short, utopian in its squeaky-clean version of France, something many of Amélie’s detractors are quick to point out as a flaw (the film was criticized for its lack of ethnic diversity long before the push for equity we witness today). Then, as a treat, the COVID-19 pandemic isolated all of us even further, exacerbating all of these problems and effectively killing communal spaces entirely. Could the kind of ensemble filling the tables of Cafe des 2 Moulins exist in 2024? I’m not so sure.
Amélie does its best to make you believe that simple acts of kindness go a long way, and that doughy-eyed lingers and grand romantic gestures are enough of a foundation to build a beautiful romance. Clearly, Sony Pictures Classic believes the film’s argument is just as ironclad as it was 20 years ago. However, no film exists in a vacuum; it will be interesting to see if a new generation, including a filmgoing audience who skew more international than ever, will be as receptive to Amélie now as the prior generation was then. Personally, I think I’m just too cynical, but maybe I’m just not ready. Maybe the film itself is already ahead of me. By the end of the film, amidst her do-gooding for others, Amélie learns to leave room to do good by herself, to both love and be loved, to relish in her own happiness regardless of her own fears and anxieties. In the film’s antidote, this may be its most potent ingredient. Things may be fresh now, but if Amélie can do it, eventually, so can I.
Amélie is currently playing in select theaters for a limited time, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.