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"Amelie" is a charmer, a movie whose embrace of cinema is so passionate it could be mistaken for an embrace of life.
Anyone who loves movies, anyone who is interested in how they're put together, and anyone who craves seeing something new and special should see this movie. "Amelie" is a safe bet, rich in humor, invention and beautiful compositions, with camera shots that are flashy but grounded in emotion and a wonderful leading lady who is 90 percent lovely and 10 percent freak.
Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("The City of Lost Children," "Delicatessen") has come close to making a great movie, which is closer than most directors ever come. Where his film misses the mark is not in its execution but its inspiration. Something is missing -- some initial need to say something, some depth of emotion, some extra idea. By the time one gets to the end of "Amelie, " one gets the sense of having watched a brilliantly made movie that's warm but not warm enough, honest but not quite rigorous enough to glow from within.
Still, it glows from without. Everything is striking, including Audrey Tautou as Amelie. With her large black eyes, pale skin and placid expression, she looks and moves like some gentle extraterrestrial -- one with an extra sense. Perhaps the sense tells her that life is a big movie. (Why else would she keep looking directly into the camera to smile at us?) Amelie is the ideal surrogate for the director, the embodiment of Jeunet's compassion and vague disconnection.
Amelie is 23-year-old woman who works in cafe in Paris. One day she discovers a tin box that a boy hid in a secret place in her apartment some 40 years before. She finds the owner of the tin box, and the effect on the now middle-aged owner is so rich and transformative that she makes it her mission to do good deeds for people.
Amelie discovers the box on the night she finds out that Princess Diana has been killed. There's no connection between the events, just an acknowledgment of the weird simultaneity of life. "Amelie" is at its best in conveying a mystical sense of life going by, of a universe of individual poignant moments rising up and receding. It's a sense that cinema, with its unlimited visual palette, is uniquely suited to conveying, and Jeunet is sincere in his attempt to convey it. There's only one way for a director to find just the right angle,
for example, to film a cat listening to a bedtime story, or a goldfish looking meaningfully at its owner: It's to feel it.
Amelie's benevolent interventions into people's lives are always interesting, and when she turns to taking revenge on a nasty grocer, the movie becomes very funny. (She sneaks into his apartment and gently disarranges things.) Too bad "Amelie" doesn't find its main story in its heroine's efforts to help people. Instead it goes in a romantic direction and becomes self- conscious. Amelie sets her sights on a young fellow who works in pornography store and spends his free time piecing together discarded photos. It's all too fey.
It also takes far too long. "Amelie" creates a lot of audience goodwill with its glorious beginning, but it tests that goodwill in its last half hour.
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