Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain: How a French Girl Restored my Faith in Humanity
*This article contains spoilers
“Amélie a soudain le sentiment d'être en harmonie avec elle-même. Tout est parfait: la douceur de la lumière, ce petit parfum dans l'air, la rumeur tranquille de la ville. La vie lui paraît si simple et limpide qu'un élan d'amour, comme un désir d'aider l'humanité la submerge tout à coup.”
“Amélie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It's a perfect moment. A soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. A surge of love, an urge to help mankind overcomes her.”
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In the first moments of Amélie, viewers are whirled into the charming French cityscape of Montmartre painted in a vibrant, oversaturated palette of color, accompanied by Yann Tiersen’s flourishing bal musette score that seamlessly plays over each shot. All these factors elicit an air of whimsy that creates an overall feeling of warmth. This is largely attributed to director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s anecdotal experiences in Paris, where he became enamored with the lively city and people.
Amélie Poulain, with her easily recognizable chin-length bob and eccentric personality, has, from a young age, retreated to the depths of her wild imagination after being homeschooled due to a misdiagnosed heart condition. Following the unexpected death of her mother, Amélie grows up in a lonely household as an only child with a father whose unsociable tendencies further increase as she matures. Yet, this film is not a tale of despair. Amélie explores and coyly toys with breaking the fourth wall, invoking the sense that I, the audience member, am existing within her world. I see things clearly through her lens by the clever utilization of quick flashing montages and scene cuts to exhibit Amélie’s daydreams, adding to the elements of surrealism. The all-too-relatable introverted anxieties Amélie feels are expressed through creative cinematic framing and special effects, such as melting into a desirous puddle of water following an awkward confrontation with her love interest at work.
The Parisian film spends the majority of its two hour runtime following Amélie’s altruistic endeavors and elaborate schemes to help various characters in a covert fashion, as if embodying fate itself. After uncovering a petite tin box hidden in her picturesque bathroom, Amélie discovers it is filled with timeworn childhood memorabilia from a previous tenant, Dominique Bretodeau. She takes it upon herself to find this unknown man and return his treasured time capsule. As she eagerly watches in anticipation from a nearby telephone booth, he is moved to tears with the overwhelming wave of nostalgia. This encounter with his childhood trinkets is a bittersweet reminder to 50-year-old Dominique that life has swiftly flown by, motivating him to reach out to his estranged daughter. Dominique's reunion serves as a catalyst for Amélie’s newfound purpose to help others, morphing from the role of guardian angel to secret matchmaker without presuming she will receive a physical reward. The reward, in this case, is joy.
Ultimately, Amélie is a story of love, yet not in the manner you may expect. While I guiltily admit I am an avid lover of rom-coms—and this film does have its fairytale ending in form of a scenic moped ride—the budding relationship between Amélie and her socially awkward beau, Nino, is not what Jeunet intended to focus on. Rather, Amélie is an ode to universal love for companionship and community, highlighting the beauty of human interaction with one another.
There is an enlightening sense of joy and fascination that comes with realizing there are simultaneously 8 billion other people in the world living their independent, unique, and individual lives daily. Such as the lady that rocked her chubby chihuahua in her arms while we both waited at the gate to board our plane, or the middle-aged man sitting next to me on my flight watching Get Out with the woman in the aisle seat concurrently viewing Encanto, a juxtaposition much too hilarious not to note. I wonder: where are they going? What led them to be here? Why did they pick those exact movies on an afternoon flight to Tampa?
I saw a fleeting glimmer of this moment during Brown’s first snowfall, a beautiful vignette frozen in time—and in mind—encapsulating the awestruck faces of college students as they undergo the drudgery of winter finals, each regressing to a child-like state of bliss and frivolity. In that moment, I felt a sudden surge in my heart from watching snowball fights ensue on the Main Green, much like that joy I imagine Amélie felt.
Amélie Poulain takes pleasure in the little—arguably, mundane to most—things in life such as dipping her hand into overflowing sacks of grain at the market, cracking créme brulée with a dainty teaspoon, and skipping stones across the water at St. Martin’s canal. However, I believe these precise and peculiar quirks are applicable to all of us. Like your fellow writer herself, who takes pleasure in the smell of old dusted books at used book stores, people-watching pedestrians in crowded cafés, and obsessively capturing every colorful sunset on an iPhone camera—despite having a copious, if not excessive amount already.
So, this spring semester, consider relishing in the little, seemingly miniscule, details in life.