For Some Adult Escapism, You Can't Do Better than Amelie
In case you hadn't heard, even though the world is on fire, it's okay to have fun. If you're ready for a dose of intelligent escapism, it's damn near impossible to improve on Amelie, an imaginative French fantasy from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, co-director of Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. Like Wes Anderson's forthcoming The Royal Tenenbaums?a film so stylistically similar in so many ways that they'd fit perfectly on a double bill?Amelie is a lush, detail-packed, widescreen fantasy, set in a world several degrees removed from anything resembling reality.
The place is Paris, and the time is the present, but the tale might as well be unfolding between the hardcovers of an oversized children's storybook?the Madeline series, most likely. There are always two or three things happening onscreen at any given time, and the pacing is so brisk and joyous that you can't laugh too loud, or too long, for fear of missing the next bit of mirth. Shot for shot, Jeunet's compositions seems to have been doodled in a notebook with a quill pen, then ink-washed to colorful life. Yet the filmmaker's loopy imagery, eccentric characters and playful plotting don't exist in a vacuum. Like all first-rate fairy tales, Amelie uses fantasy to make valid points about real emotions: loneliness, friendship, desire and community.
The title character, adorably played by newcomer Audrey Tautou, lives by herself in a small Paris flat and works in a coffee shop. But these external conditions don't begin to describe her life; Amelie lives inside her head, and the world she's created there?a world incubated in childhood, and elaborated upon ever since?is a lot more fun. Though she barely seems to have meaningful contact with anybody, she keeps tabs on all of her neighbors, cataloging their comings and goings, their likes and dislikes and their hobbies. (At times, she suggests a kooky, working-class, French kid sister of Grace Kelly's character in Rear Window?a comparison Jeunet, with his playful nods to Hitchcockian voyeurism, happily invites.)
The chance discovery of a tin full of childhood playthings buried under Amelie's apartment floorboards leads to an impulsive decision to return the toys to their rightful owner?most likely a boy who lived in that apartment decades ago. Resolving to return the goodies without revealing her identity, the shy Amelie transforms herself into a Nancy Drew-like plotter, uncovering the target's identity and then luring him into a public place where she can watch him react to rediscovering a piece of his childhood.
This is just one narrative thread in a movie that's wound tighter than a nylon cord, but it's crucial to understanding where Amelie is coming from?and where it's going. Reconnection with childhood has obsessed Jeunet throughout his career; the theme was present, to greater or lesser extents, in Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and his solo outing, Alien Resurrection, a widely unappreciated Hollywood sequel that transformed that series' queasy fascination with pregnancy and birth into something fresh, powerful and oddly moving: a meditation on the idea of the mother as Dr. Frankenstein and the child as monster. The light tone of Amelie is light-years removed from the iron-booted menace of the Alien series, yet it touches similar psychic chords. The heroine lost her mother as a child (she died like a Toon), and one can interpret her sweetly defiant brand of aloneness as an attempt to prove that she can survive without depending upon anybody else?emotionally or otherwise.
By itself, this notion might seem a storyteller's contrivance. Jeunet elevates it to a philosophical statement by making it apply to every other character in the movie, even minor characters seen only in fleeting glimpses. Like The Royal Tenenbaums, Amelie is narrated by a wise, rueful third-person narrator who recites relevant facts about the characters and their world in the easygoing tones of a loving parent reading a story to his child at bedtime. (There are echoes of other French film classics as well, including Jean Renoir's French Cancan and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, from which Jeunet borrows not just a few widescreen compositions, but a bit of soundtrack music too.) Everyone in this world has obsessions, recurring dreams, lifelong goals (attained or not). They're all united by their optimism, their myopia and their base desires. Amelie comes out of her shell as the story unreels, but she never gives up her peculiarities; she becomes not a better person, but a braver one?and encourages others to do the same.
We all live our lives alone, the film says, yet we're all in life together, and we have more in common than we could possibly realize or admit. Amelie's fascination with Princess Diana finds its equivalent in every other character; there's even one young man (La Haine director Mathieu Kassovitz) who loiters around photo booths, picking up discarded sheets of head-shots so he can paste them into a scrapbook. A marvelous montage finds Amelie staring out at the Paris nightscape, imagining all the thousands of people who must be having orgasms at that exact moment. The film then shows us a montage of those climaxes, one after the other, in strobe-quick flashes that heighten their humor and sexiness; the sheer variety of copulating bodies?straight, gay, young, old, thin, heavy?amounts to a democratic statement, and the uniqueness of each ecstatic outburst reminds us of just how personal, mysterious and reverent sex can be. Jeunet and his masterful cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel, pack the movie with frames so vivid and suggestive that they seem to pop off the screen. Contraptionist slapstick schemes?Jeunet's specialty?unfurl with crazed, Rube Goldberg-like perfection. In quieter moments, Amelie brackets odd, lovely close-ups, dropping out the music and most of the sound effects, letting the image break out of the scene and attain a sublimity all its own. An early childhood sequence that shows Amelie freeing a pet goldfish by dumping it off a bridge into a stream ends with a close-up of the goldfish staring up at her, blowing big fat puzzled bubbles. Goldfish aren't terribly expressive, yet somehow, you know what this one is thinking: "Um, okay?Now what?"
The film's insistence that every human being has an inner life as complex and crazy as Amelie's is another link to Jeunet's filmmaking past. City of Lost Children was about a mad scientist who had lost his ability to dream, and kidnapped children in order to leech, vampire-like, off their pure, unspoiled imaginations. The notion of a whole civilization running on buried imaginative energy was so profound that it powered the film past its errors in pacing and misjudgments of tone. Like City, the more polished, clockwork-assured Amelie unfashionably insists that in our hearts?and in our subconscious minds?we are all created equal. No private fantasy, nightmare or longing is superior to, or inferior to, any other. Therefore true love requires finding a mate whose quirks and obsessions match our own: not in subject matter, but in intensity. Before the film is through, Amelie will have found her match.
Framed
Past, present: You might not think of experimental short film fans and aficionados of early cinema as overlapping groups, but both should turn out for a new series at the American Museum of the Moving Image, titled "Shadow Play: Avant-Garde Views of Early Cinema." In one of the more original curatorial notions in recent years, the lineup examines the notion that avant-garde cinema isn't actually "ahead of the curve," as the French phrase suggests?rather, it represents an attempt to keep in touch with the primitive, suggestive, simplest sources of film's power over our subconscious. In other words, everything new is old again.
Film scholar Tom Gunning opens the series Nov. 3 at 2 p.m. with a two-part presentation that contrasts movies from the very early silent era (many of which are simply soundless records of man-made and natural wonders) and modern avant-garde films in which modern filmmakers (including Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton and Ken Jacobs) interrogate early cinematic images and turn them into something eerily new. The highlight is Jacobs' rarely seen 1971 film Tom Tom the Piper's Son, which systematically examines a 1905 Biograph short, examining every part of every frame like a detective obsessing over a mystery that can't be solved.
Film before Film (Nov. 17, 2 p.m.), Walter Nekes' look at the crude early inventions that eventually led to cinema (flip books, magic lanterns, etc.), is accompanied by a series of shorts that illustrate experimental cinema's links to this early, awe-inducing trickery. One of the selected films is The Death Train, a mesmerizing short by Morrison that intercuts close-ups of projector gears and sprocketed film loops with images taken from the front of a traveling locomotive; backed by train sounds, the film suggests that cinema was an engine of forward progress, too.
The 1995 anthology Lumiere and Company (Nov. 11, 4 p.m.) celebrated the centennial of cinema by asking numerous contemporary filmmakers, including David Lynch, Spike Lee, Patrice Leconte, Zhang Yimou and Abbas Kiarostami, to make one-minute, silent, black-and-white short films using a replica of an original motion picture camera belonging to the Lumiere brothers. The results prove, beyond a doubt, that cinema is fueled not by technology but by imagination, and that whether the result is art or hackwork it expresses the uniqueness of its creator as surely as a fingerprint. Leconte, stylistically very much the traditionalist, puts the camera in the same place as a 1895 Lumiere brothers short depicting the arrival of a train; Hugh Hudson, the unreconstructed ad-man behind Greystoke and Chariots of Fire, makes a pretentious little bit about Hiroshima; Jacques Rivette, who often concerns himself with the intersection of the past and the present, trains the camera on a television to capture what he insists is the news of 1895. For more information, check out the museum's website, ammi.org, or call 718-784-0077.