On 10 September 2001, filmgoers gathered for the North American premiere of Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s tale of a meddlesome waitress in a picturesque Paris. Inside the Elgin Theatre at the Toronto Film Festival, they watched – entranced – as young Amélie mingled with the locals on the streets of Montmartre. She cracked crème brûlée and skipped stones on the canal. She made everything magically, perfectly right. The film ended happily, the guests filed out, and a few hours later, a pair of hijacked planes reduced the World Trade Center to rubble. These events, it should be noted, were entirely unconnected.
Now Amélie is back, resurrected for its 25th anniversary, dressed to the nines and prancing out of the past. It’s as ageless as a vampire, indestructible as a zombie. Its constant charm offensive is tantamount to harassment. Most viewers love Amélie and I completely get why they do, because it looks gorgeous, acts sweet, and doesn’t flag for a second. But Jeunet’s lavish confection ought to come with a health warning, like the cigarettes behind the counter at the Two Windmills café. They’re aromatic and tasty. They’re also toxic; they’ll kill you. In the immediate wake of 9/11, New Yorkers baulked at inhaling the foul dust that was swirling around Lower Manhattan. So they ran to the movies and saw Amélie instead.
Those who love Amélie by definition love its irrepressible title character. Amelie is embodied by a 23-year-old Audrey Tautou, who keeps the movie aloft and handles the plot twists and turns with a gymnast’s grace. Amélie, we learn, is cripplingly lonely and shy in the manner of all good romantic heroines, which is to say that she’s winsome and kooky and always beautifully put together. Fancying herself as an invisible samaritan, she embarks on a mission to help her oblivious friends and neighbours find comfort, solace and true love. So she pulls strings from the sidelines and observes the effect that this has. She flashes conspiratorial smiles at the camera to include us in her trickery.
Even so, doubts remain. The more the girl interferes, the more the locals lose their marbles. Does Amélie mean well, or does she just like making trouble? Her handiwork causes sickness, nervous breakdowns and a bout of furious jealousy. Might Amélie be a horror film in disguise? Tilt its sugar-coated heroine slightly to the left and she’s Mia Goth with an axe beside the stable in Pearl (2022).
“I showed a beautiful Paris, a fake one – no dogs*** on the streets,” Jeunet would joke, but his houseproud approach veered towards social cleansing. French critics accused the film of peddling a whitewashed “retro postcard” vision of the city for predominantly foreign consumption.
Despite being shot and set in the multicultural neighbourhood around the Abbesses Metro station, the film barely features a single Black face. Amélie nods to Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) with its hyper-real style and careful colour scheme, while its line in star-crossed romance recalls the films of Eric Rohmer. Except that where Rohmer’s work was footloose and natural, Amélie feels mechanistic, contrived. Everything’s fake: the city, the people. Jeunet arranges his characters as though they’re bright illustrations in a children’s picture-book. They do the job and advance the plot. Not for one moment do we believe that they’re real.
In a parallel world, Amélie might have died like Little Nell after its American premiere. “I showed the film in Toronto, and the day after the screening it was 9/11,” the director would later recall. “I thought, Amélie is finished in the USA. But it was the opposite.” The film won the festival’s crowning People’s Choice award. It opened to ecstatic reviews in the autumn before going on to become the most successful French-language picture at the US box office.
The way Jeunet saw it, Amélie filled a sudden urgent public need. It offered a spoonful of sugar, a reassuring little hug. “People needed positive stories,” he said. “They needed something with joy, something light.” The 9/11 attack, one might say, was Amélie’s very own Amélie. It pulled the strings from afar and helped send Jeunet’s film stratospheric.
Movies change over time – or more likely, the world shifts around them – and so it is with Amélie. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. Nonetheless, I can’t think of another film from its era that’s quite so fascinating on the rewatch. Those outraged French critics turned out to be only half-right. Amélie harks back to a nostalgic version of Paris that probably never existed to begin with. But it also points forward, sniffing the air of the 21st century and brilliantly anticipating the direction of travel. There is an obvious reason why Jeunet’s film hasn’t aged. It’s because it was eerily, supernaturally ahead of its time.
“Do you want to meet me?” asks Amélie, an influencer before the term was coined, who constructs lavish fantasies from behind the counter at work. Jeunet’s tale is set in 1997, immediately after the death of Princess Diana, and features payphones, scrapbooks, and photo booths that break down. But it’s an analogue film about digital culture, possibly the world’s first Instagram movie: a social-media romance, in all but name, that sends its heroine through a city that feels suspiciously box-fresh and stage-managed. Everyone in Montmartre is either performing or hiding. They are waiting for the technology and the language to catch up with their dreams.
What’s Amélie up to? She’s scripting the future, that’s what. She’s posting coy, teasing selfies and sliding into the DMs of her cohort. She’s enjoying a sexy virtual relationship with the young guy from the fairground, and wondering whether or not she should meet him face-to-face. Come to think of it, what’s with all the conspiratorial nudges and winks to the camera? It’s as if she’s inviting us to step inside and join her, and knows full well that we will.
Once, years ago, she might have passed as a loner and an oddball, a fantasist to be swerved. But times have changed and the culture has upgraded. God save us, send help: we’re all Amélie now.
‘Amélie’ is back in cinemas from 3 April
Leonardo DiCaprio is no longer the man of the moment – and he’s a better actor as a result
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are simple and unadorned – no wonder they’re easy to turn into films
Sam Worthington: ‘I know what James Cameron wants – and I’ll give it to him’
Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy on rebooting the ‘outdated ideas’ of Enid Blyton
Inside Marianne Faithfull’s final gift to the world: ‘She was a force’
