Posted: 11/16/01
© 2001 Filmmonthly.com

Destiny, fate, chance...I admit to being kind of captivated by all of these concepts. One of my all time favourite movies is Sliding Doors, so that should give you some indication.

Amélie likes to go to movies and look back at peoples' faces in the dark, notices things no one else does, and skims stones. On the day of Lady Di's death, she finds a small metal box in her bathroom that changes her life forever.

Finding the box, full of a boy's 40-year-old treasures, and deciding to return them to their rightful owner starts her on a quest, much like Emma and her modern counterpart Cher, to help strangers and her friends be happy. She befriends her neighbours, plays cupid for her co-workers, and helps blind beggars get to the subway, describing everything she sees along the way. She also punishes those she feels need punishing, sometimes to hilarious effect. But can she help herself be happy?

Her cold and distant father, a retired Army doctor who never showed her affection, has been even colder and more distant since the death of Amélie's mother, a neurotic teacher. He builds a shrine to her memory and crowns it with a red-hatted garden gnome she always hated.

Amélie (played by gamine Audrey Tatou who I am sure will be compared to another Audrey, so I won't do it) is happy with her solitary life, until she meets an odd shy young man, Nino, at a coin operated photo booth. He drops a photo album filled with discarded, torn up pictures from booths like it all over the city. And in looking through it, she feels a kinship for him.

But will she return the album to him? Will she meet him?

There is a similarity of thought in another recent movie, Serendipity. Amélie, I think, explores the concept better. Not of chance meetings, fate or destiny...but of setting yourself up for failure.

In a way, Amélie is about trying to screw up happiness as much as anything else. For Amélie, after seeing Nino and being attracted to his quirkiness as much as to his face and form, does almost everything she can not to meet him. He may be the one, he may be her destiny, but she's almost more afraid of living happily ever after than she is of continuing with the familiar, lonely as it is...

I am single right now, and dating. Being something of a computer geek, I have enrolled in an online dating service and lately have been having a lot of semi-blind dates. And it's interesting. We do so much to not be alone, to meet people, to try to find the one we're meant to fall in love with. We pay money. We dress up. We advertise ourselves. It's worse than trying to find a job and going on interviews. And the minute we meet someone who clicks, and we think we may have found "the one," we do everything we can to sabotage it. We give ourselves hoops to jump through. We make arrows leading them to us in birdseed. We arrange meetings by taking a photo with the time and place in a photo booth, and then we tear it up and throw it away, hoping the intended recipient finds it and pieces it back together. We write our phone numbers in books and sell them to used bookshops. We write short, terse one-line emails that say nothing when we feel like scripting sonnets, and we call people and hang up if they actually answer the phone. What are we so afraid of? I find myself doing stupid things like this, and it's rather fascinating to see it portrayed up there on the big screen.

Whatever it is that makes us run away from potential happiness, Amélie feels it too. She sets up a meeting with Nino at the café where she works as a waitress (Les Deux Moulins - the Two Windmills - there are many illusions to the Quixotic here), and then pretends not to be herself even when Nino speaks to her, and asks her if she is the girl in a photo he has. Yet, she has another waitress slip him a note so he will come to meet her again.

She continues this game until finally, a neighbour everyone calls the "Glass Man" (because he has that brittle-bone disease Samuel L. Jackson had in Unbreakable), who never leaves his apartment and who trains his video camera on a nearby watch shop so he never needs to set his clocks, gets her to help herself for a change.

And when she does, she lives happily ever after.

France has already announced that this will be its entry for "Best Foreign Film" in the Oscars. As well it should be - it's a photographic wonder. I wonder, though, if like two other recent nominees in that category, if it too can't transcend and perhaps run for "Best Picture" as well?

One last thing, which I have to mention...To cheer the Glass Man up, Amélie makes him videos of random things on TV she thinks he'll like. One of these is a little clip of (click here to see it) Peg Leg Sam Jackson doing his "hard luck dance." The URL is actually listed in the film's credits.

The moral of the story? Don't let your head talk louder than your heart...and for heaven's sake, if you like someone, give them at least half a chance to like you back!

Coco Delgado is a writer who always sits in the front row. For fun she moves to different cities, which have included Montreal, San Francisco and Atlanta. This year it's Boston..