2 hours of escape
Amiable and affable ‘Amélie’ gets Blu-ray release
A Blu-ray of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amélie” arrived the other day; the film has been re-released by Sony in a steelbook edition in advance of its 23rd anniversary. It’s the only movie I ever remember getting into a real argument over as an adult.
I will talk all day about the movies and will sometimes offer strong opinions, but the cinematic experience is so subjective and personal that it seems silly to get combative about what are essentially matters of taste. But this person — an academic — made me mad at a dinner party by suggesting not only that Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind” was a better film than “Amélie” but that “Amélie” was sentimental fluff for simple-minded people.
I nearly flipped over the dining room table.
Not that I have any particular animus against “A Beautiful Mind” — in my review from December 2001 I called it “a tasteful quality Hollywood motion picture — the kind that could win any number of Academy Awards” and concluded that, though some might call it “adventurous … because it takes as its hero an intellectual rather than a soldier or a spy … it is entirely conventional, unwilling to delve too deeply into the connections between creativity and madness, between inspiration and folly, and instead gives us another story of love conquering all, of the brave benighted sucking it up and just ignoring the demons calling to him.”
Not bad; just not what it might have been. But dinner-party Herr Doktor thought it the best thing since bagged Chianti, which he had every right to do. He thought it highly moral because it portrayed a protagonist afflicted by mental illness. Fair enough. (He also allowed that he believed that individual genes have souls.)
But his slagging off on “Amélie” as a kitschy opiate for the masses
did not sit well. Like a lot of other people, I love “Amélie.” It is a deeply humane picture that aspires to healing sweetness. More than that, it was one of the last movies I saw before the world was blown apart on Sept. 11, 2001. It was — and remains — a souvenir of the world before we were used to magnetometers and the reflexive fear that rises whenever more than a few of us are gathered in a public place.
The irony of the crucial movie at the heart of this argument being gentle-tempered “Amélie” is not lost on me. But in the end there are some things I’m willing to roll around in the dirt for to defend their honor.
THE CURSE OF WEINSTEIN
“Amélie” premiered in France on April 25, 2001, and had an Oscar-qualifying limited release in the U.S. in November 2001, opening wide in February 2002. Apparently the only new feature on this Blu-ray is a short with Jeunet reminiscing about the making of the film, so if you have the 2011 that was released by Lionsgate, you might want to wait a year or two to see if Sony Pictures Classics — the film’s current distributor — doesn’t come out with a super-deluxe package for the 25th anniversary of its release.
How Sony Pictures Classics came to be the distributor for the film is inside baseball.
Some people will remember “Amélie” as the last film distributed by Miramax Zöe, the French division of notorious Harvey Weinstein’s production and distribution company. This association with Weinstein may be why “Amélie,” though nominated for five Oscars (sound, cinematography, art direction, original screenplay and foreign language film) was shut out at the 2002 Academy Awards. Even as far back as 2002, people were pretty sick of Weinstein.
Jeunet had battles with Weinstein on earlier films, and there’s anecdotal evidence that Weinstein wanted to re-cut the film. It was only after it started winning overseas awards — four Cesar Awards, three European Film Awards, two BAFTAs — that Weinstein began campaigning hard for the film.
Jeunet wrote in an online column that “the Academy, tired of Weinstein’s vote-collecting ‘abuse,’ decided to boycott his films.” Jeunet believes “Amélie” was collateral damage in this boycott. “Whoopi Goldberg, president of the (Oscars) ceremony, spent the entire ceremony making fun of Weinstein. The result being, out of 19 nominations, he won only one Oscar” in 2002.
“Amélie” was originally distributed by UGC Fox Distribution, a French-American film production company formed in 1995 by GC — a company operating movie theaters in France and Belgium that until 1988 was known as Union Générale Cinématographique — and 20th Century Fox (now known as 20th Century Studios) to produce and distribute films across France. (UGC was absorbed into the French division of Fox in 2005.)
U.S. distribution rights to the film were sold to Miramax Zoë. Lionsgate had a deal to distribute Miramax films on DVD. But we all know what happened to Weinstein and Miramax, and Sony Pictures Classics — an autonomous division within Sony Pictures — now owns the U.S. distribution rights to “Amélie.” SPC exercised those rights on Valentine’s Day, re-releasing the film in 250 theaters across the country.
I didn’t know all this before I started writing this column — if you’d asked me who the distributor of “Amélie” was/is, I would probably have said “Miramax,” but then I’d have looked at the steelbook case and said, “uh, I guess Sony now?” Anyway, crediting either Miramax or Sony would be problematic and not very helpful to readers. Crediting a distributor for a photo they’ve provided us to promote their movie is an opportunity to introduce error into the newspaper, something we try to avoid.
I’d rather credit the individual photographer who took the shot, though there are problems with that I might get into at another time. I’d rather write about the movies than the movie business. The curse of Harvey Weinstein sometimes makes that possible.
LOVE STORY
Considering how much of an impact “Amélie” made on me, I was surprised to discover I didn’t review “Amélie” for this newspaper. I sat beside the critic who did.
Since my wife Karen wrote the review, we saw it in the evening, after a day split up to catch as many movies as possible between us at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival. In those days, we’d go our separate ways during the day but make a point of meeting up at the final movie of the evening. Some days each of us would have seen four or five films before that last one — afterward we’d get dinner and talk about our day. “Amélie” was one of the last movies we saw in what we now call “The Before.”
(“Amélie” won the People’s Choice Award at the festival, which was loaded. It also featured Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” two other films I’d rank among the best of the 21st century, and a Canadian feature called “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner” I still think about from time to time. And Arliss Howard’s “Big Bad Love,” based on the life and writings of my friend Larry Brown.)
“Amélie” — the original French title was “Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain” (“The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain”) — is a whimsical and quirky tale of the guiless title character (Audrey Tautou), a painfully shy gamine in a Louise Brooks bob who comes to believe her life’s work is delivering uncomplicated happiness to the people around her through innocent Rube Goldberg-ish pranks. Jeunet can fairly be described as a sort of Gallic Terry Gilliam, as he often seems concerned with overly intricate mechanisms and the amplified unintended consequences of seemingly trivial occurrences.
But “Amélie” lacks the kernel of bitterness that marked Jeunet’s earlier films, (especially those made in collaboration with the animator Marc Caro) like 1991’s “Delicatessen” and 1996’s “The City of Lost Children.” Those are fantastic dystopian visions populated with well-intended freaks, capitalistic scoundrels and imperiled innocents. They read more like disturbing dreams than black comedies.
“Amélie” is a romantic confection, as much a valentine to the Paris-locked village of Montmartre as it is to Tautou’s uncomplicated loveliness, which echoes that of another Audrey, name of Hepburn.
A second delight can be found in the way that Jeunet employs computer animation, which in 2001 still had an air of edgy dubiousness about it. Yet here, when Amélie turns her wide brown eyes up to a brilliant blue French sky and sees bunny-shaped clouds, the effect is digital enchantment.
While the film is set in Paris in 1997 — around the time of Princess Diana’s death — Jeunet conjures up a storybook city with all traces of modern banality digitally removed. This is a hyper-saturated Paris with the Pompidou Centre and glass towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale elided, a nostalgic CGI-derived Paris that feels timeless and dream-like, stylized in the way of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a pastel Paris far warmer and less sinister than the one portrayed in Baz Luhrman’s lurid “Moulin Rouge!” that was released in the U.S. a little more than a month after “Amélie” was released in France.
(It is one of those odd cinematic coincidences that “Moulin Rouge!” and “Amélie” in some ways seem to be in conversation with each other — both are highly stylized films set in Montmartre, with “Moulin Rouge!” portraying it as a seedy and lewd corner of the world and “Amélie” proffering it as benign and neighborly; the cafe Amélie works in is a real place called Café des 2 Moulins — “the two windmills.” Both directors playfully indulge certain Parisian stereotypes. Neither is subtle.)
The very funny first act of the film provides us with backstory. Amélie’s childhood and parents are sketched, largely through a comic voiceover (in French) by rumbling Andre Dussolier that explains the particular tastes of her neurotic mother and emotionally cool father, and how that effectively discouraged their daughter from making friends or becoming anything more than a waitress in a small cafe. All that is prologue to the day in her unremarkable apartment when she stumbles across a tin box hidden behind the tiles in her bathroom, belonging to a previous tenant, who was then a lonely little boy.
Amélie contrives a covert way to reunite the owner — now a lonely grandfather — with his possessions, and his shock and gratitude convince her to make this sort of secret do-gooding her life’s work. These playful, childlike missions are interrupted when she meets and falls in very grown-up love with Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz, director of “La Haine”), a part-time cashier at a Pigalle porn shop whose shyness and fragility mirrors Amélie’s. Nino collects discarded photo-booth strips — he roots them out from beneath the booth with a ruler — and preserves them in an album.
Amélie has been watching him from afar when he accidentally drops the album at a railway station. She sets about returning the album and getting Nino to fall in love with her.
UNCOMPLICATED
It’s not hard to resist “Amélie.”
Her Paris is not real-life Paris, it has been largely scrubbed of crime and immigrants, and more than one dinner party academic found a way to pronounce it “racist.”
On the other hand, one of the featured actors, Jamel Debbouze, is of Moroccan descent. And there were all sorts of ethnicities mounted in Nino’s photo album.
It’s a fairy tale; some think it should be more representative of the multicultural reality of Paris.
In her review, Karen concluded, it “succeeds because, despite its setting in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities, despite adult situations, despite romantic entanglements, and despite its unique interweaving of computer animation around a real world, it still retains a naive sense of wonder. Amélie’s picturesque, peculiar universe is not like ours, and that makes it a desirable destination, at least for a couple of hours.”
A couple of uncomplicated hours of escape. Which is what a lot of people are looking for when they go to the movies, Herr Doktor.