Love and dreams: imaginative worlds, romance brighten new films. . - Movies - movie review

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 23, 2001 by Joseph Cunneen

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie was a tremendous hit in France and should do well here, but super sophisticates will hate it. Perhaps its original title, "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain," gives a better sense of the movie's good-natured self-mockery. Both a fairy tale and a shaggy-dog story, it's a series of picture postcards of an essentially pre-WWII (and all-white) Paris that pass by at breakneck speed, to the accompaniment of a wisecracking commentator, Andre Dussolier.

The movie's burlesque opening recounts, in the old-fashioned tone of long-ago newsreels, the tale of Amelie's sad childhood. She was forbidden formal schooling and the company of children her own age because her doctor father decided she had a heart murmur -- it beat faster whenever he came near her. Instructed at home, she lost her mother teacher when the poor woman was crushed on the porch of Notre Dame by a tourist from Quebec who had jumped from one of the towers.

Audrey Tautou, an enchanting brunette with large dark eyes, is shy and mischievous as the grown-up Amelie. After leaving her father alone in the suburbs with his memorial to his wife topped by a large gnome, she goes to work as a waitress in a Montmartre cafe, plays elaborate tricks on a grocer who is unjust to his one-armed assistant, and in general tries to make the world better. The narration wanders, pursuing jokes more than plot. Amelie watches a TV program on the good works of her life; premier Francois Mitterand is the commentator, and there is a shot of her in the garb of Mother Teresa's order. She even takes the neighborhood blind man by the arm and walks him across the street, while providing a rapid-fire account of everything she sees going on in front of the stores. The atmosphere is further enhanced by Amelie's old neighbor, the painter Dufayel (Serge Merlin), who works tirelessly to recreate Renoir paintings and eventually teaches her -- via videotape -- to embrace life more directly.

Some of the gags are stale, and the movie takes too long with its love story because of the heroine's extreme shyness. She is drawn to Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), a confused young man who spends a lot of time lying on his stomach, looking under photo machines for spoiled identity photographs and pasting them together in a scrapbook. Amelie leaves surprising clues to her identity and sets up mysterious meetings but keeps postponing the inevitable.

The movie's sunny disposition will seem excessive to some. Amelie arranges to have postcards of her father's garden gnome posed against famous landmarks sent to him mysteriously from various cities, and the grocer's assistant finally becomes the artist's devoted new pupil. On the whole, however, "Amelie" dodges the very naivete it draws on; when it makes use of special effects, it doesn't ask us to take them too seriously. And the movie speeds up again at the end as Nino and Amelie ride off on his motorcycle, the "lived happily ever after" conclusion deliciously qualified by the radiant heroine's direct wink at the audience.

If you're looking for something more experimental, perhaps more demanding, you might try Rich Linklater's Waking Life. Shot in video as an ordinary movie and then transformed into computer graphics by animation artists directed by Bob Sabiston, it doesn't try to satisfy those who insist on narrative. Though it returns to its opening at the end, nothing much happens. An unidentified protagonist (Wiley Wiggins) awakens in a dream and walks around Austin, Texas, and other locales, mostly listening passively as a series of speakers make quick philosophical pitches, sometimes nutty, sometimes erudite, for their varied points of view. Sartre's existentialism is presented in hopeful terms, one speaker argues passionately that a brief period of consciousness continues after death, Andre Bazin is quoted on how film captures the reality of the moment, and a wide range of perspectives is offered on the meaning of dreams. Wiggins seems to have no particular goal; he levitates, wonders whether or not he is awake, and comes to believe that even waking up is part of his dream.

Faces and images change color, and extensions of people's thoughts emerge in side panels, suggesting an unfinished universe compatible with the way a scientist describes the action of molecules. Except for Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, most of the speakers are not actors, and the overall atmosphere is that of an undisciplined graduate seminar -- only faster and funnier. Less successful is a sequence in which a prisoner behind bars rants about torturing his enemies to death. Linklater mostly leaves the question open as to whether we're listening to jokes or serious contributions to Wiggins's overall education. The audience I saw the movie with was confident about laughing at the end of one sequence in which two gun enthusiasts end up shooting each other, but were less certain about how to respond to "I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving," at which the speaker's face turns into a large gear. There's probably extra significance in the statement of the pinball player (played by Linklater) near the end of the film: "There's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity."