Affairs of the Heart

She wears dark socks, sensible shoes, an unfashionable red sweater and, if anyone would notice, her heart on its sleeve. A waitress at the Two Windmills cafe in Paris, Amelie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is one of the legion of shy solitaries that few people seek out and fewer movies think to put at their center. But inside this gamine child of 23 is a priestess of the imagination, a ruthless schemer, a canny do-gooder, a lover. She has mischief in her, and a kind of secular sainthood.

Fortunately for us, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and screenwriter Guillaume Laurant made Amelie from Montmartre (originally Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain), which has become a blockbuster in France and an international hit, and made a star of its leading lady. "It's crazy to see how people like the movie in England, Switzerland, Japan," says the dark-eyed Tautou. "There's so much fantasy and so many ideas in just one movie. Everyone can relate to one of these ideas." Miramax Films, which distributed Il Postino, Life Is Beautiful and Chocolat, bought Amelie for the U.S. and has an idea of its own: to duplicate Amelie's success in America. It's the company's Oscar-push picture. Miramax is banking that this intimate epic has the charm and pulse to seduce viewers here.

As a solitary child--her father distant, her severe mother dead--Amelie amused herself with hand puppets; her playmates are things. Now grown-up, a waitress, she seeks sensuous, not sensual, pleasures: cracking the shell of a creme brulee, skipping stones in the local canal. Her life changes on Aug. 31, 1997, with the news of Princess Diana's death. In surprise she drops a perfume stopper, which rolls toward the wall; behind a loose brick she discovers something else, a boy's prized chest of trinkets, 40 years old. She resolves to find out who the owner is. She gets the box to him and, when she catches the transfiguring glow on his face, decides to make a career of doing good.

Amelie sees herself as both Lady Di and Mother Teresa: "Godmother of the Outcasts, Madonna of the Unloved." She brings a couple of crabby folks together at the cafe, befriends a brittle-boned artist, takes revenge on the cruel boss of a disabled worker and masterminds a treasure hunt for another sweet soul, Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz). Yet when Nino comes courting, she hides. The stage manager of everyone else's love life, Amelie is stage shy herself.

Like Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, also set in Montmartre, this is a film about people who are either uplifted by love or twisted by its lack and one where the director has so much to say and show that he can't keep his images still. You could get drunk, or ill, on the high dose of whimsy in Amelie. That's fine--too many European movies suffer from emotional constipation and camera anomie. Jeunet travels the road of excess, telling dozens of peripheral tales, cueing American tunes from the '40s to play in a '90s Paris cafe, working in whatever style suits the moment, letting a key in Amelie's pocket radiate to signal intrigue, or literally dissolving her into a puddle of water when Nino finally shows.

Jeunet, whose previous film was the Hollywood Alien Resurrection, was eager to make a picture back home. "I love L.A.," he says, "but it's a place, it's not a city. I wanted to move to Montmartre, to live in Paris." Amelie was to be played by Emily Watson, but when she bowed out, the first actress he tested was Tautou. "And I thought, Is it real? No, I saw the test on video. She's perfect. Each day during the shoot, I said, 'You're perfect. Do exactly like in the test.'"

Amelie is the sort of lonely, lovely girl the young Audrey Hepburn played. Tautou, though she lacks Hepburn's petrifying beauty, is worth comparing to the Audrey. Her tight, seraphic smile holds a universe of promise and mystery; and in the right light, she's adorable. From her first prominent role, as a pig-tailed salon assistant in Tonie Marshall's 1999 Venus Beauty Institute, Tautou has been France's Star of Tomorrow du jour.

Now audiences have fallen in love with Amelie-Audrey, a fusion of the actress and her character. "Unfortunately," she says, "I'm not like her. I had a happy childhood. I have less imagination, and I'm more timid. When someone sees me, I don't want him to meet me. I wish I could be enchanted by this." Tautou, now shooting her first English-language film, Dirty Pretty Things, for Stephen Frears, will have to settle for being an enchantress.

Jeunet's Amelie will hope to do the same: open your eyes. Look around, the film says, and not just at the usual exhibitionists. There's magic and heartbreak in the shiest creature. Finally, with her lover's sleeping head in her arms, Amelie realizes she has someone else to love: herself. And that is her fabulous destiny.