25 Great French Films: Ebert's Essentials

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Amélie threestar ½

R, 115 m., 2001

Audrey Tautou (Amélie Poulain), Mathieu Kassovitz (Nino Quicampoix), Rufus (Raphaël Poulain), Yolande Moreau (Madeleine Wallace), Artus de Penguern (Hipolito [The Writer]), Urbain Cancelier (Collignon [The Grocer]), Dominique Pinon (Joseph), Maurice Bénichou (Dominique Bretodeau [The Box Man]), Claude Perron (Eva [The Stripteaser]). Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and produced by Jean-Marc Deschamps and Claudie Ossard. Screenplay by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie is a delicious pastry of a movie, a lighthearted fantasy in which a winsome heroine overcomes a sad childhood and grows up to bring cheer to the needful and joy to herself. You see it, and later when you think about it, you smile.

Audrey Tautou, a fresh-faced waif who looks like she knows a secret and can’t keep it, plays the title role, as a little girl who grows up starving for affection. Her father, a doctor, gives her no hugs or kisses, and touches her only during checkups—which makes her heart beat so fast he thinks she is sickly. Her mother dies as the result of a successful suicide leap off the towers of Notre Dame, a statement that reveals less of the plot than you think it does.

Amélie grows up lonely and alone, a waitress in a corner bistro, until one day the death of Princess Diana changes everything. Yes, the shock of the news causes Amélie to drop a bottle cap, which jars loose a stone in the wall of her flat, which leads her to discover a rusty old box in which a long-ago boy hoarded his treasures. And in tracking down the man who was that boy and returning his box, Amélie finds her life’s work: She will make people happy. But not in any old way. So, she will amuse herself (and us) by devising the most extraordinary stratagems for bringing about their happiness.

I first began hearing about Amélie last May at the Cannes Film Festival, where there was a scandale when Amélie was not chosen for the official selection. Not serious, sniffed the very serious authorities who decide these matters. The movie played in the commercial theaters of the back streets, where audiences vibrated with pleasure. It went on to win the audience awards at the Edinburgh, Toronto, and Chicago festivals, and I note on the Internet Movie Database that it is currently voted the twelfth best film of all time.

I am not sure Amélie is better than Fargo (No. 64) or The General (No. 85), but I know what the vote reflects: immediate satisfaction with a film that is all goodness and cheer—sassy, bright, and whimsical, filmed with dazzling virtuosity, and set in Paris, the city we love when it sizzles and when it drizzles. Of course this is not a realistic modern Paris, and some critics have sniffed about that, too: It is clean, orderly, safe, colorful, has no social problems, and is peopled entirely by citizens who look like extras from An American in Paris. This is the same Paris that produced Gigi and Inspector Clouseau. It never existed, but that’s okay.

After discovering the box and bringing happiness to its owner, Amélie improvises other acts of kindness: painting word-pictures of a busy street for a blind man, for example, and pretending to find long-lost love letters to her concierge from the woman’s dead husband, who probably never mailed her so much as a lottery ticket. Then she meets Nino (the director Mathieu Kassovitz), who works indifferently in a porn shop and cares only for his hobby, which is to collect the photos people don’t want from those automated photo booths and turn them into collages of failed facial expressions.

Amélie likes Nino so much that one day when she sees him in her café, she dissolves. Literally. Into a puddle of water. She wants Nino, but some pixie quirk prevents her from going about anything in a straightforward manner, and success holds no bliss for her unless it comes about through serendipity. There must be times when Nino wonders if he is being blessed or stalked.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet has specialized in films of astonishing visual invention but, alas, impenetrable narratives (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children). He worked for Hollywood as the director of Alien Resurrection (1997), placing it, I wrote, in what looks like a large, empty hangar filled with prefabricated steel warehouse parts. With Amélie he has shaken loose from his obsession with rust and clutter, and made a film so filled with light and air it’s like he took the cure.

The film is filled with great individual shots and ideas. One of the best comes when Amélie stands high on the terrace of Montmartre and wonders how many people in Paris are having orgasms at that exact instant, and we see them, fifteen in all, in a quick montage of hilarious happiness. It is this innocent sequence, plus an equally harmless childbirth scene, that has caused the MPAA to give the movie an undeserved R rating (in Norway it was approved for everyone over eleven).

It is so hard to make a nimble, charming comedy. So hard to get the tone right and find actors who embody charm instead of impersonating it. It takes so much confidence to dance on the tightrope of whimsy. Amélie takes those chances, and gets away with them.

Au Revoir les Enfants fourstar

PG, 103 m., 1988

Gaspard Manesse (Julien Quentin), Raphael Fejto (Jean Bonnet), Francine Racette (Madame Quentin), Stanislas Carre de Malberg (Francois Quentin), Philippe Morier-Genoud (Father Jean), Francois Berleand (Father Michel), Francois Negret (Joseph), Peter Fitz (Muller). Directed, written, and produced by Louis Malle.

Which of us cannot remember a moment when we did or said precisely the wrong thing, irretrievably, irreparably? The instant the action was completed or the words were spoken, we burned with shame and regret, but what we had done could never be repaired. Such moments are rare, and they occur most often in childhood, before we have been trained to think before we act. Au Revoir les Enfants is a film about such a moment, about a quick, unthinking glance that may have cost four people their lives.

The film was written and directed by Louis Malle, who based it on a childhood memory. Judging by the tears I saw streaming down his face on the night the film was shown at the Telluride Film Festival, the memory has caused him pain for many years. His story takes place in 1944, in a Catholic boarding school in Nazi-occupied France. At the start of a new semester, three new students are enrolled, and we realize immediately that they are Jews, disguised with new names and identities in an attempt to hide them from the Nazis.

To Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse), however, this is not at all obvious. Julien, who is intended as Malle’s autobiographical double, does not quite understand all of the distinctions involving Jews and gentiles in a country run by Nazis. All he knows is that he likes one of the new boys, Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejto), and they become friends. Bonnet is not popular with the other students, who follow the age-old schoolboy practice of closing ranks against newcomers, but then Julien is not very popular either; the two boys are a little dreamy and thoughtful—absorbed in themselves and their imaginations, as bright adolescents should be. Malle’s film is not filled with a lot of dramatic incidents. Unlike such roughly comparable Hollywood films as The Lords of Discipline, it feels no need for strong plotting and lots of dramatic incidents leading up to the big finale. Instead, we enter the daily lives of these boys. We see the classroom routine, the air-raid drills, the way each teacher has his own way of dealing with problems of discipline. More than anything else, we get a feeling for the rhythm of the school. Malle has said that when, years later, he visited the actual site of the boarding school he attended, he found that the building had disappeared and the school was forgotten. But to a student enrolled in such a school, the rules and rituals seem timeless, handed down by innumerable generations and destined to survive forever. A schoolboy cannot be expected to understand how swiftly