Amélie
dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Miramax

Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked that all one needs to make a movie is "a guy, a girl and a gun." And while Godard backed himself with 1964's recently reissued Band of Outsiders, countless cinematic storytellers have proved that stories of love may be the most difficult to master. With such recent clunkers as You've Got Mail, Bounce and The Princess Diaries doing their part to lower the cinematic romance signal-to-noise ratio, a film to tip the scales back in the other direction is more than overdue. Enter Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie.

There's no gun in Amélie. Nor is there even, for much of the movie, a guy. Instead, the film revolves around its charming namesake, played by Audrey Tautou.

When Jeunet introduces Amélie, she's nothing but egg and sperm. Followed by a quick, lonely, essentially mirthless childhood, Amélie leaves her widowed father, gets an apartment in Paris and a job as a waitress at a restaurant called The Two Windmills.

As an adult, the still-lonely Amélie struggles to connect with anyone and takes pleasure in such simple, tactile things as skimming stones or thrusting her hand into a bag of dried lentils. Her life changes, however, when she anonymously reunites a lonely, fiftysomething man with a box of artifacts from his childhood and makes his life better in ways she hadn't thought possible.

From that point on, Amélie decides, her life will be devoted to anonymously doing good. She helps a blind man cross the street, hastily and vividly describing all the sights before dropping him off at a subway entrance and disappearing. In the end her kindness changes her life forever, finds her a guy and more than makes up for lost mirth.

That Tautou in some scenes is made up to bear a striking resemblance to another famous Audrey hardly seems an accident. Whether she's tape recording odd bits of television for housebound neighbor, working in the kitchen or coyly playing matchmaker with Two Windmills regulars, Amélie is as likable a character as you'll find in movies.

But Amélie beats out most love stories not only because of its namesake's immeasurable charm, but because of the tack Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant's script takes on the love story. Romances tend to fall into two categories, focusing either on an established couple working through some rough spots or on two people who are so obviously right for one another finally overcoming adversity and getting together.

Amélie, though, opts for neither of the above. At the point of its heroine's life-changing event, she hasn't even laid eyes upon Nino, the film's guy. And as the movie progresses, Jeunet generally reveals information about Nino only as Amélie discovers it. By making half of the couple-to-be an unknown quantity, the story captivates.

And the film's visuals stack up with its dazzling story. Amélie's apartment, for example, is a classic Jeunet set. Its red interior saturates the print, giving scenes shot there a radiant, Technicolor glow in direct opposition to the dreary, cartoon-like dreamscapes of Jeunet collaborations with Marc Caro, City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. Such whimsical fantasy sequences as a conversation between two pictures hanging on Amélie's wall and a lamp on her nightstand marry up perfectly with the film's semisurreal sets.

Bolstering Amélie's appeal is Jeunet's use of an element that made Band of Outsiders enjoyable, a narrator who occasionally reveals the characters' most trivial, inconsequential thoughts. In much the same way Godard's narrator related that "Franz is wondering whether the world is a dream, or a dream the world," Jeunet's serves up insights into his most minor characters' likes and dislikes. The film's audience is told, for example, that Amélie's father loves peeling strips of wallpaper, but dislikes peeing next to other men. A cat Amélie takes care of for a friend likes listening to children's stories.

In the end, anyone trying to convey up what makes Amélie such a fresh, enjoyable romance is doomed to omit some of his favorite moments. It suffices to say the movie should be seen solely for the straight-on shot of the wide-eyed Amélie at the movies. "I like looking back at people's faces in the dark," she whispers, looking back at her audience's faces in the dark. Jeunet, his cast and his crew have succeeded in spades. And all this without a gun.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)