She even reunites a man with a rusty old box of forgotten childhood treasures, a moment which struck a chord so deeply for Bretodeau that he vowed to reconcile with his estranged daughter and the grandson he has never met. She stands up to the bully grocer Collignon who relentlessly jabs at his meek but good-natured assistant Lucien. She carefully choreographs the perfect meet-cute between her hypochondriac colleague Georgette and resident cynic Joseph. Before we even begin, the narrator discloses: “Amélie’s only refuge is the world she makes up.” Amélie may be wandering through the cobbled pathways of Montmartre in 1997, bearing little resemblance to the 18th arrondissement we know today, but it is the individual acts of kindness that make Jeunet’s fairy-tale endlessly spin like the Foire du Trône carousel. Leaving the world of realism and violence behind in favour of the surreal and generous set the tone of the film from the get-go. He recalled: “We wanted to get a smile from the audience, so I knew I was going to talk about generosity and it’s a risk because today it is more fashionable to speak about violence”. In an interview with IndieWire, Jeunet explains how he knew the film would be a collection of individual stories, all tied back one way or another to the central story of a woman simply helping others to get by. As the new millennium dawns, the director’s cinematic fantasy turns away from the post-Freudian worlds he has created and towards a search for beauty in the banal. Plunging your hands into a bag of seeds piercing the crunchy caramelised crust of crème brûlée with the tip of a spoon skipping stones across the Saint-Martin canal – these are few of the small pleasures that make life worth living for the protagonist of Amélie.Ģ021 marks twenty years since the release of Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain starring Audrey Tatou as a wide-eyed café waitress in Paris, a candy-coloured romantic comedy which broke from the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s previous films Delicatessen (1991), The City of Lost Children (1995) and Alien: Resurrection (1997). Aliya Arman explores how we must come to terms with our desire to return to a Paris which never was. It’s felt in no better place than the romantic visualisation of Paris in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, which turns 20 this year. There exists a relationship between le lieu de mémoire and French cinema, which provides some background on how cinema memory can be considered a part of cultural memory in contemporary art.
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