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Amélie
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1. Middlebrowbeaten (column, January 2002)
Surfing online
film sites, I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unbeatable opening clause.
“For those made vomitous by the white-sugar, smile-button Paris foisted on us
by Amélie …”. Thus began the
distinguished Bostonian critic Gerald Peary, en route to another French movie
more to his taste, the down-and-dirty Baise-moi (2001). But let’s back up a little on the strange culture war sparked all over
the globe by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s international smash hit, Amélie, known more grandly on its native soil as Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.
Jeunet is best
known for his strenuously stylised, cartoonish collaborations with Marc Caro –
although, for my money, his best film remains the criminally underrated Alien Resurrection (1997). Perhaps
feeling a little anonymous in Hollywood, Jeunet returned home to craft the
quintessential magic-realist comedy-romance that non-French people are sure to
call “very French”. It’s an energetic, boundlessly inventive, relentlessly
sweet film, soldering the self-consciousness of modern pop to a swooning dream
of a nicer, safer France. The only pertinent reference Jeunet fails to include
is the old Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin tune: “On the streets of Montmartre, there’s
a Frenchy kind of art …”
Jeunet’s
Frenchy kind of art tells the tale of innocent Amélie (Audrey Tautou) who lives
to fulfil the dreams of others (even when they are unaware of her wily stage-managing)
but inwardly pines for a love of her own. It’s a fairy tale for the world’s
“little people” and their big dreams. So who could fail to be charmed by this
film? (See my own review below.) Well, as it turns out, it has left quite a few
professional viewers feeling quite contrary. The anti-Amélie army grows more rabid with each passing day. In Argentina, a
flamboyant critic, editor, and film festival director known in public only as
Quintín writes that, like its heroine, Amélie is “dull, almost insignificant … very few films require so little from the
viewer”.
His verdict was mild in comparison with the salvo that started this entire war, from the enraged film critic Serge Kaganski of the French newspaper Libération. To him, Amélie is a New Right, even “ethnically cleansed”, sickly nostalgic fantasy – like the Australian Spotswood (1992), a supposedly benign daydream that looks back to the pre-multicultural ‘50s (hence Peary’s white-sugar slur). Jeunet testily responded with anti-critic insults almost identical to those I once received in the mail from a prominent Australian filmmaker, who accused me of fatally lacking “taste, education and mental health”. (Take a bow, Nadia Tass!)
The wider
significance of the Amélie controversy indeed centres on the vexed matter of taste. Without ever quite
saying it, the film’s enemies see it as the epitome of middlebrow cinema – bland, flattering, easy to consume, quick to
forget. As a rule, a certain breed of impassioned, serious critic tends to
champion the extremes of cinema – the most demanding, innovative, experimental
films (ultra-highbrow) or the trashiest horror and action films (disreputably
lowbrow). Such critics are almost phobically averse to consensus favourites and
comfortable crowd pleasers. Serge Daney, Libération’s
chief critic in the 1980s, epitomised this stance when he declared that “a good
film doesn’t unite, it divides”. Such a politique is seductive, but it also dismisses out of hand a great deal of undeniably
popular, well-crafted and thoughtful cinema – some favourite targets, alongside
Jeunet, include Agnés Jaoui (The Taste of Others, 2000) and Giuseppe
Tornatore (Malena,
2000).
The charm of Améllie may well fade with coming years,
but it is hard to believe that its crimes against cinema and humanity are
really so horrible or enormous as its detractors claim. As much as I hate to
admit it, the middlebrow may be the final frontier of this particular film-culture
war.
2. Review (December
2001)
In
a series of classic films made between the 1920s and the ‘60s, Fritz Lang
conjured the figure of Dr Mabuse – a seemingly immortal phantom permanently
hidden behind veils and screens, communicating his sinister commands via the
latest technological media. Mabuse was the master controller of society, an
omniscient and omnipotent stage manager of events small and large. Lang
acknowledged, with grim irony, that Mabuse was in part a stand-in for himself,
the notoriously tyrannical, perfectionist director.
Jean-Pierre
Jeunet is a gentler, more benign Mabuse for the new millennium. His early films
made in collaboration with Marc Caro, Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995),
set forth a penchant for Baroque Expressionism mixed with lusty humour. Whether
it was the orgiastic spectacle of sex cries filling a cityscape in the former,
or the elaborate labyrinth of passageways and tunnels linking all places and
characters in the latter, Jeunet’s cinematic fantasy declared itself: to map
the world and show the intricate interrelation of all its parts, from the banal
to the momentous.
After
his experience in Hollywood with Alien
Resurrection, Jeunet scored a massive, global hit with Amélie. It offers a lighter version of his recurring fantasy,
emphasising the classic populist theme of ordinary people going about their
quotidian lives, each with some unfulfilled dream. Amélie (Audrey Tautou) has
powers of perception into these lives that border on the mystical. She is a
kind of everyday saint, contriving ways to make dreams come true. Deep in her
heart, however, she entertains an egotistical, even maudlin fantasy. She does
not want to die unacknowledged and unloved. So she begins shyly pursuing her
own dream-man, Nino (Matthieu Kassovitz).
Amélie’s
extended vision, however, cannot compare to Jeunet’s. From the first seconds of
this fast, prodigious film, he is zipping around everywhere. His storytelling
method owes a lot to the new modes of information-gathering bequeathed to us by
the digital age. Far more dexterously than in the dire Vanilla Sky (2001), the introduction of each new fact or character
“opens a link” to a mini-movie. In these wonderful sequences, we discover lists
of everyone’s likes and dislikes.
Amélie tries a
little too hard to please, and runs out of puff before the end. Its Gallic
charm is laid on with a trowel for the world market. Those who dislike or even
despise the film refer to it as a grotesque compendium of artificial
contrivances, pushing the dream of an alternate, perfect world on par with Steven
Spielberg’s sinister, pop Utopias. But these critiques strike me as overstated. Amélie is not a great film but it is entertaining
and imaginative. Jeunet’s cartoonish style reaches often hilarious and surreal
heights – virtually every scene is a frenzy of small, quick movements, darting
eyes and tiny surprises. Jeunet is like an architect gone mad – every space has
to be geometrically mapped and then appended to every other space within the
overall design of this magical Montmartre.
Tautou
maintains her girlish buoyancy to the end. And even though Jeunet is mostly
happy to suspend us in fairytale notions of eternal happiness, he occasionally
lets a mordant trace of love-gone-wrong peep through his sunny, pastel palette.
Postscript: Although my own relatively positive and
benign opinion on Amélie is clearly expressed in the above pieces from late 2001 and early 2002, that
did not stop me getting hate-mail at the time, pointing out that I am clearly
unable to see that the film is “only innocent entertainment”, and not some
political tract. Sigh …
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