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.