Amélie Review

Jeunet treats every frame as a place to hide something. Bruno Delbonnel grades the whole film toward green and gold, shoots on wide lenses at close range so faces bulge slightly out of a curved Montmartre, and lights interiors like sodium lamps at dusk. The result is a Paris that never existed, which is the honest position for a fairy tale. Yann Tiersen's accordion and toy piano are practically a second script. The plot is the weakness, a sequence of errands rather than an arc: the box of childhood treasures returned to a stranger, the garden gnome mailed around the world, the blind man walked through a burst of narrated street detail.

Only the pursuit of Nino through the photo-booth discards accumulates real tension, and even that resolves on a stall Amelie invents for herself. Audrey Tautou holds it together with an unusually watchful comic performance, most of it played in the eyes with the mouth barely moving. The film's sanitized city has drawn fair criticism. Taken as design rather than story, the invention-per-minute rate is extraordinary and almost nothing feels borrowed.