Amélie (2001)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie arrives with a palette of greens and golds, a score of accordion waltzes, and a heroine who rearranges the lives of her Montmartre neighbors with the quiet determination of a filing clerk. It is a lovely thing to watch. Audrey Tautou's Amélie is shy, isolated, and possessed of an imagination that runs well ahead of her courage, and the film follows her small campaigns of kindness with real tenderness. The ensemble is a cabinet of eccentrics: a hypochondriac, a reclusive painter, a young man who photographs strangers in passport booths. Charm, in this case, is not a crime.

The trouble, such as it is, lies in what the film declines to notice. Serge Kaganski observed at the time that this Paris is a postcard with the demographics airbrushed out, and the defense that Jamel Debbouze appears as Lucien does not quite answer the charge. He is present, and the film does nothing with him. Amélie's gender is likewise a fact instead of an argument. She is a woman who engineers her own happiness, and the film treats this as romance, not as a case to be made. The greengrocer Collignon receives a comeuppance for his cruelty to his meek assistant, which is a small comic pleasure and not an indictment of commerce.

There is no queer presence here, no environmental conscience, no reckoning with history, and no sermon. The eccentrics of the Café des 2 Moulins are never diagnosed, and Amélie's shyness is a temperament, not a condition. This is a fable that wants only to be liked, and it succeeds. For those of us who spend our evenings cataloguing the ideological freight of popular cinema, the film offers a strange kind of relief: a text with almost nothing to say and a great deal of pleasure in saying it. We score it accordingly. Some vintages are light, and light is not the same as empty.