Product Description

Quiet and reserved, Amelie Poulin spends her days as a waitress at a Paris cafe and entertains herself by playing kindhearted practical jokes on her neighbors, finding love in the meantime.
Genre: Foreign Film - French
Rating: R
Release Date: 14-JAN-2003
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #973 in DVD
• Brand: TAUTOU,AUDREY
• Released on: 2002-07-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 122 minutes

Amazon.com
Perhaps the most charming movie of all time, Amélie is certainly one of the top 10. The title character (the bashful and impish Audrey Tautou) is a single waitress who decides to help other lonely people fix their lives. Her widowed father yearns to travel but won't, so to inspire the old man she sends his garden gnome on a tour of the world; with whispered gossip, she brings together two cranky regulars at her café; she reverses the doorknobs and reprograms the speed dial of a grocer who's mean to his assistant. Gradually she realizes her own life needs fixing, and a chance meeting leads to her most elaborate stratagem of all. This is a deeply wonderful movie, an illuminating mix of magic and pragmatism. Fans of the director's previous films (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) will not be disappointed; newcomers will be delighted. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
A waifish, bobbed Parisienne discovers her mission in life: to bring unexpected happiness to others, and so to herself. Such is the story of Amélie (Audrey Tautou), and the simplicity of it-not to mention its dangerous surfeit of sweetness-appears to have touched a universal nerve. (In truth, the saga of the movie's success is more telling than anything in the movie itself.) Tautou is clearly a find, although one wonders what Mathieu Kassovitz, who plays the object of her affection, made of his role; it was Kassovitz who, in 1995, yanked French cinema up to date with his baring of ethnic hostilities in "La Haine." The Paris of this new movie lies at the other extreme, although what nags at you most is not the neighborly charm but the itchy, unsettled manner of the director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. How far should we trust a plea for benevolence when it feels like a box of tricks? In French. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Charming !!!
This is an instant classic. Directed with a retro and modern feelers entwined throughout every scene, Amelie pulls you in and again further still. This movie seems like a children's tale and would make a great film for such with proper edits. It finishes with a nice moral rub for shy or difficult to understand people embedded in a warm, gooey bed of personal satisfaction. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

2nd time viewing..
I watched Amelie on DVD several years ago for fun, and really enjoyed it. Then a few weeks ago I finally ordered my own DVD and watched it again. It's great to watch even a second time thru, probably because it's hard to catch everything the first time. And that's because many of the good parts of Amelie are very brief, especially in the first 20 minutes or so when Amelie's childhood & teenhood are shown in a pretty fast pace. Just like how the official summary of the movie describes Amelie, she is "painfully shy" but also playful & enthusiastic with her eccentric hobbies, like skipping stones (as well as "stealing" nice skipping stones throughout the movie XD), and helping people out.

As for the content of the movie, the story has some elements of intrigue & mystery, and with the shy-yet-mischievous Amelie character wanting to do things in her indirect ways, a lot of light-hearted action takes place while these little "mysteries" are solved. Overall it starts off as a comedy, with bits of adult content (brief showings of nude breasts & non-explicit sex scenes), a few fun fantasy elements like inanimate photos & animal-objects talking to her, and gradually turns into a light, adorable romantic comedy in the 2nd half. She and her love interest are based on a curious crush on each other, with their main goal being to simply find out more of each other, without meeting, yet. XD (As opposed to typical romantic comedies where the main characters hook up, fight, get back together, have dramas, then FINALLY get back together.)

Another thing to note about this movie is the presentation. The style is very artistically composed, with colors being selected & saturated to get an almost toy-like world in some scenes. The various characters have distinct personalities, from an obnoxiously bossy vendor to a quiet, wise painter.

Overall, people who are tired of typical romantic comedies will like how eccentric this movie is. Shy/quiet people will relate to Amelie's interests & personality, as this is a very "character-driven" movie.

j'adore!
i love this movie so much. finally a happy-go-lucky movie with charm that'll make you laugh and feel all warm and fuzzy inside! :)