Details
- Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
- Year: 2001
- Starring: Audrey Tautau in her breakthrough role as Amélie Poulain
- Setting: A romanticized, vibrant version of the Montmartre district in Paris.
- Age rating: R (for nudity and some profanity)
- Genre: Romantic Comedy/Magical Realism.
Personality-wise, if you are an INFP (or maybe an INFJ) this is the movie for you: Amélie (or Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain) is like a love letter to INFPs – it doesn’t get any better than this! So sit back, enjoy a nice créme brûlée (pay attention to the way you break open the sugar-layer with the tip of your spoon), and enjoy my review!
Premise
A shy, eccentric and quirky waitress decides to change the lives of others for the better, while also falling in love.
Analysis
Amélie is a profoundly good movie, with good and deliberate quirky acting and dialogue and an enormously good chemistry between the lead actress (Audrey Tautau) and her co-stars, especially with Serge Merlin, who played Monsieur Raymond Dufayel, or “the man made of glass”.
The director Jean-Pierre Jeunet used a visually stunning palette of heavy digital color-grading to give the film a warm sepia-toned glow, dominated by greens, yellows and reds which were used at the right times in the right scenes and followed each other smoothly. He uses a wide-angle lens, very close to the actors faces, which creates a “fairytale-ish” look. Lastly, his direction focuses on the extraordinary on the ordinary, using quick montage, quirky character traits and magical realism (like a beating heart glowing through a blouse).
The theme of this movie is love – not only romantic love, no: love for everyone around you, because everyone deserves love in one way or another. And after watching this movie, I think we all love Amélie to some extend – we just wished the real world was like that.
Her quest for making the world a better place, but always from a distance and being shy and due to that not good at showing her love for the one she loves pulled at my heartstrings and shows that every life matters.
This all together with a great theme song that screams melancholia and much intimacy made the movie all that more special and, yes: I did cry. Oh did I cry at some moments. It’s like a warm hug you haven’t had in years but really needed.
The especially masterstroke moments for me were the symbolic speech moments between Amélie and Monsieur Dufayel about the girl with the glass of water on his latest painting, by which he clearly meant Amélie and we see when the story ventures forward still more color being painted on the girl with the glass, until the moment that… (Spoiler). Let’s just say the ending is one of my favorite endings in cinema I’ve seen thus far and comes into the list of best film endings, where Vertigo and City Lights also belong to, so that’s saying very much.
As for personality types, Amélie is the quintessential INFP, she lives in her own world (the dreamer) and in her vision she must make the world a better place (the mediator), without looking out for her own future (“Do you have children, Madam”). Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) clearly resembles an ISFP (The Adventurer) who is on a quest to find out who the man in the photo booth is. But while Amélie is already one of my favorite movie characters, I believe I like Monsieur Raymond Dufayel more. He is the watcher. The one who keeps everything in check even from his small apartment that he hasn’t left in the last twenty years because of his bone-condition. He is, above all, an INFJ. He is the soul of the story, where Amélie is the heart. He has this mysterious personality, with a bit of a snappy aftertaste (Ni-Ti loop) and every year he paints the same painting over and over again, obsessively, describing the most minute details, from the personality of his characters to what they eat or drink that year, even of Amélie. Yes, he is the soul of the movie, Amélie the heart and Nino the quirky spirit.
Final verdict
Amélie is one of my favorite movies of all time that I especially watch when I am in the mood for something heartfelt and quirky, yet symbolic and French. Therefore, I can’t do anything different than to give Amélie the five out of five stars ⭐️. I recommend this movie to cinephiles, but also people who want something that sits between a blockbuster and arthouse as a movie. I do not recommend this to people below 16 due to nudity and profanity. But for the rest: it’s quintessential cinema.
How would you rate this movie? Let me know below:
Thanks for reading and how did the créme brûlée taste? I hope it tasted as good as the movie was.
Yours,
Rein
TAZÍ 
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