Amelie

This movie is about a girl named Amelie Poulain. Her father is a doctor and a man who keeps to himself. He and her mother are neurotic people. Amelie never got hugged growing up. The only physical contact she every received from her father was when he did medical check-ups. As a result her heart rate would speed up. Her father was convinced that she had a heart problem. Amelie was home-schooled by her mother because they thought it was not safe for her to be in school with a heart problem,

She grew up without any friends. To amuse herself she developed an active imagination. Her mother died when Amelie was young. She died in a freak accident when a suicidal girl jumped off The Notre Dame Cathedral and landed on her. The death caused Amelie’s father to be even more distant. He began to build a shrine in their yard for his late wife’s ashes.

When Amelie grew up and moved out of her father’s house she began working in a café called The Two Windmills. The café is filled with very interesting and eccentric people. The owner is a former circus performer and the counter girl is a hypochondriac. The customers match the staff with an over jealous ex-boyfriend and an unsuccessful writer.

Amelie leads a simple life. She has had past boyfriends but non successful. She enjoys doing simple pleasures such as sticking her fingers in grain and cracking crème brulee. She also enjoys walks in the park and skipping rocks on water. She seems to be a very sincere and sweet girl.

One day while she was watching tv and about to brush her teeth she saw on the news that Princess Diana had died in a car accident. In shock she dropped the cap to the toothpaste and it rolled to the wall and a tile cracked in the wall. She removed the tile and in the wall found a little box filled with pictures and toys that a young boy must have hid. She decided to try to find the boy and give him the box. If he was happy to get the box back, then she would try to help other people.

While trying to find who lived in her apartment before her she meets the rest of the tenants living in the same building. She meets Magdalene who tells Amelie about how her husband used to write her love letters and then one day ran off with another woman. She also meets the bully owner of the vegetable stand and his employee. She meets her neighbor Raymond, a painter, who helps her find the owner of the box she found. Raymond, also called the Glass Man because of his brittle bones, enjoys painting the Luncheon by Renoir.

Amelie returns the box to the owner by leaving it in a phone booth and calling it when the man walks by. She watched the man enter the phone booth and receive the box. Seeing the joy in his face she decides to devote her life to helping others. She sets up the jealous ex-boyfriend with the hypochondriac. She writes a love letter to Magdalene pretending to be her husband and saying how he was sorry for leaving her and that he loves her.

She found out that her father and her mother wanted to travel around the world but couldn’t because of her supposed heart problem. She sees her father putting a garden gnome in the shrine. She takes the gnome and has her friend who is a stewardess take pictures of the gnome around the world and send it to her father. Her father thinks it’s his wife’s spirit and is inspired to travel again.

While she is looking after others, no one is looking after Amelie. In helping other people achieve happiness, she is forced to examine her own lonely life, now made more apparent and painful by her relationship with Nino. Nino is a quirky young man who collects the discarded photographs of strangers from passport photo booths, whom she has fallen in love with. She makes him search for his photo album that he had lost in treasure hunt type tactics. Although she intrigues him through her various roundabout methods of attraction, she is painfully shy and incapable of actually approaching him. He begins to pursue her. The two finally get together at the end with a little persuasion from Raymond.

I enjoyed this movie. I thought it was filmed in a very interesting fairytale like way. It was a very sweet amusing movie.