Once upon a time, not long ago, 20 years to be exact, the world watched the beginning of a story that has started 48 years. The story of an extraordinary girl named Amélie Poulain in non-everyday Paris. France’s capital is often the epitome of romance and arts; however, at this time, it is decorated by her fantastical perspective. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) is a coming of age, romance, and the fairy tale of contemporary.
The audience follows from her childhood to young adulthood, shades of yellow to the green and red ones. Each colour has a special meaning and feeling to the spectators. Yellow represents old, shown in the flashbacks from her girlhood. The shades of green represent her growth, the red colour illustrates love and womanhood. I believe the film is a figment from her imagination.
Her fantasy is evident by the contrast of the drawn properties versus the reality like the LP Pancakes. A similar strategy was used in Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1951) with the butterflies. Amelie's imagination is indicated by the break the fourth wall moments. The omniscient heterodiegetic narrator might represent her inner voice.
The narrator focuses on the peculiarities of each character that Amélie crossed, the ephemeral moments of a daily basis, and her surroundings. It is shown since the beginning, before the fecundation, the narrator talks about other flat characters instead of showing the character who baptized the film. However, it shows a facet of the character Amélie is not the protagonist of her life as she is always busy doing the “good pranks” for others and escaping from her problems. Following the Prophet Gentileza's ideal “Kindness begets kindness”, as at the end of the film she has her own happily ever after.
Twenty years since we first met her, but the messages the film teaches the spectators will go on for many generations in a row. Besides the positive acts of generosity and negative role of supporting character from her life. Amélie teaches us to enjoy the simplicity and small pleasures of life, everybody is weird and eccentric in their way (and it’s okay!), and there are so much more in the world that we do not have any idea of. It goes beyond our liminal perspective of our own lives and interests or even major collectively impacted events like the death of Lady Diana on August 30th, 1997. Adapting to nowadays, there is much more besides the screen we tend to scroll 24/7. Like the film, the real world is full of cold colours contrasted with the red highlighted objects, which only a few are attentive to the many ephemeral details that go unnoticed in the real world full. These lost thousandths will never come back.
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