Amelie
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DVD details
Actor: Audrey Tautou, Lorella Cravotta, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Serge MerlinBrand: Buena Vista Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-07-16
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Miramax Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Amelie
DVD Review: an author and director's artificial fantasy so far from real love in the real world
Summary: 2 Stars
I would have loved this movie without Amelie. I would love a love story or a drama about the real often middle aged or older people in this movie confronting their lives and their loves and their pain, and finding something to sustain themselves in the real grind of life, not in the actions of an ignorant girl with no respect for other people.
This is a very artificial movie. It dresses itself up in supposed quirkiness, it claims to be romantic but it is not about what real love or even friendship is about, real people knowing each other, liking each other, sharing their humanity, real people living in life.
Essentially, the character Amelie is a person with no social skills, no real friends, and no experience in life or love, and little desire. Yet, she sets herself up with no experience to disturb the happiness and pattern of other people by lying, trying to fix people up with others who are not really interested in each other, and theft. She steals precious letters from her father to fabricate lies for her concierge--is it an emotional problem you cant be more faithful to your father than to a stranger.
The character Amelie really has not respect or faith in the humanity of other people. She only sees them as good or bad, and from a position of ignorance of life breaks into people's homes and steals things, doctor's people's food and medical supplies to cause them wrong, etc. etc. All of this without trying to find out why people feel the way she does, even though her own life from conception is treated with understanding and explanation for her supposed pain.
Amelie ultimately falls in love with a man whose work she steals for a period of time and does not seriously, promptly or courteously attempt to return to him. Instead, she ferrets out the secrets of his work, and then forces him to go through all kinds of twists and turns and running and climbing up and down hills that would cause a normal person a heart attack.
For what? She doesn't know him. Nothing meaningful is revealed in his work but obsession. What does she love, a person? Or is it that this movie is supposed to be a love story but the author and directors don't know how to talk about real love and real life, so they artificially produce it give this film a plot, when it really has not much of one.
At the close of the movie, he comes to her house, she prevents him from speaking to her--having seen him once or twice without saying anything--and they make love. Then they are seem going through Paris on her motorbike, her father, despite the purloined letters of his love being stolen, decides to travel the world which never has done before, etc.
This movie is nothing but the fantasy of the author and director that isolates love and happiness from real life. A character is created who in essence has no life--curiously before she does all this she is shown not to be interested in boy friends and romance--and no real aspirations. We learn, a bit surprised, that she just wants love in the abstract or so we are told after being told that she doesn't. Nothing really convinces her that she should. The film simply relies on the fact that we are inserted in a discourse of realizing that movies with attractive young women are love stories. The assumption is that completion in life for women is only love with a hunking handsome moveie actor type of man. We note all other men except the lover she choses without hearing or speaking a word to him are middle aged or disfigured or ancient. Her treatment of other people really ranges from the greatest rudeness and manipulation to crime. I have always thought love involved accepting the humanity of others and realizing that your own humanity can be share with them.
Real people struggling to make a real living, real people with quirks and imperfections, real people who do not look as classically beautiful--but dressed unfashionably and "quirky" as the costume designer for the film wishes--who are really beset with making a real living-are belittled, persecuted, or given the drastic surgery by crime or abuse that Amelie seems to carry out. No one who has known the Paris neighborhood Amelie lives in can figure out how she can live in such an apartment, in such a building, on a waitress's tips.
The film seems romantic, but it really exports romance outside of real life. The character seems sympathetic, only because she has no real life; none of the real desires needs, ambitions and wants that real people have. Her actions as some beneficent match maker and changer of trouble people's life in the real world would be better replaced with an ability to learn about the pain that people who have had more life and reality have.
She finds her father's letters of passion for his mother while he was away in the army. Instead of cutting them up and using them to falsify that a philanderer didn't desert her concierge, she should have revisited her view of her mother and late father whom she has remembered as cold and cruel as once being a woman of passion and a man filled with poetry and fire of love. Shouldn't she want to talk to her father about this, treat him differently, respect him as she has not to this point. Indeed who in the world does Amelie respect?
See this movie as a low level fantasy for childish thoughts, rather than the deep arty romantic movie it attempts to be. Instead, it is someone's fantasy that sees love as alienated for real life. That is sadness.
Description of Amelie
Nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay, this magical comedy earned overwhelming acclaim nationwide! A painfully shy waitress working at a tiny Paris cafe, Amélie makes a surprising discovery and sees her life drastically changed for the better! From then on, Amélie dedicates herself to helping others find happiness ... in the most delightfully unexpected way! But will she have the courage to do for herself what she has done for others?Perhaps the most charming movie of all time, Amélie is certainly one of the top 10. The title character (the bashful and impish Audrey Tautou) is a single waitress who decides to help other lonely people fix their lives. Her widowed father yearns to travel but won't, so to inspire the old man she sends his garden gnome on a tour of the world; with whispered gossip, she brings together two cranky regulars at her café; she reverses the doorknobs and reprograms the speed dial of a grocer who's mean to his assistant. Gradually she realizes her own life needs fixing, and a chance meeting leads to her most elaborate stratagem of all. This is a deeply wonderful movie, an illuminating mix of magic and pragmatism. Fans of the director's previous films (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) will not be disappointed; newcomers will be delighted. --Bret Fetzer
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