Amelie

Not since The Full Monty’s inexplicable success has a film been so rapturously received for so little discernible reason. Seriously hailed in several publications as 2001’s standout film to date, Amelie is an undeniably amiable but somewhat twee and inoffensive example of cinema at its ‘nicest’ – perfectly okay in itself, and destined to hit the spot with middlebrows and no-lifers everywhere, but nothing like the life-changing and generation-defining masterpiece you may have been led to believe.

It’s director Jeunet (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children)’s first project without the collaborative assistance of Marc Caro, whose vision was evidently the darker of the two on this evidence. Amelie isn’t merely the kind of film you could bring your grandparents to: even your great-grandparents might find it up to their speed. Easy-going in the extreme, it follows the heart-warmingly altruistic schemings of its titular heroine, a waif-like Parisian single girl who devotes her existence to brightening the lives of others and doing everything in her power to vanquish their troubles.

Played with competent if irritatingly cutesy charm by this year’s next-big-French-thing Audrey Tautou, Amelie is the only child of a nervous-wreck nother and a cold, distant army-doctor father, and becomes so excited at her father’s only physical contact with her (a monthly heart check-up) that said heart starts to beat so fast it’s assumed she has a critical condition.

Educated at home and spared the degredations and cruelties of school, Amelie grows up an extremely solitary creature blissfully locked inside her own vivid imagination: she leaves home at seventeen, takes up work

waitressing, and discovers that she is completely unintersted in sex. At

which point, the film unleashes its

key twist: the 1997 death of Englich aristocrat Diana Spencer in a Paris-situated car crash. This news shocks

and upsets our heroine so grievously that she drops a bottle, and upon stooping down, finds a box of hidden treasures hidden in a hole in the wall. What with Diana having cashed in

her chips, Amelie than appoints herself the ‘queen of hearts’, resolving to find the treasure’s owner while injecting happiness and cheer into the lives of

all the unfortunate people she encounters....

There has been a rainforest of printed praise elsewhere about the apparently ‘irresistible’, ‘beautiful’, ‘glowing’ and ‘joyous’ nature of Amelie, and its regenerative effect on all who see it,

so it’s hardly Moviehouse’s place to join the fanfare. There’s absolutely nothing you could hold against it,

all the same – the script and acting

are never less than lively, and although a minority of French critics have attempted to stir outrage by suggesting that the all-white world Amelie chooses to depict betrays its hidden leanings, this suggestion is so illogical and indicative of PC paranoia as to be worthless.

Charming, with its heart positioned firmly in the right place, Amelie’s overt soppiness managed to get up this observer’s nose from time to time, but rest assured your auntie will love it.