‘I smile every time': why Amélie is my feelgood movie

The Guardian

26-05-2025

The hallway leading to my boyfriend's flat features a Japanese poster of the 2001 French romcom, Amélie. Why it's there is something of a mystery to us both; none of his neighbours have laid claim to it yet and, between the ground and second floors, it's the lone decoration among a sea of teal tiles. Yet there Amélie is, reading in bed beneath two portraits of a goose and a dog in Elizabethan collar. I smile every time I see the poster, reminded of the sometimes-silly, small pleasures that make life worth living. And better yet, our miraculous capacity for being good to one another.
Although Amélie was one of the first 'adult' films I ever watched, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything very serious in it at all – except, perhaps, for the brief compilation of couples in orgasm. The titular Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a shy but mischievous waitress in Montmartre, Paris.
As a young girl, her mother was killed by a suicidal Canadian tourist who jumped from the roof of Notre Dame. Amélie's father then becomes increasingly withdrawn and devotes himself to building a miniature shrine to house his late wife's ashes. It's a lonely childhood for Amélie, but the tragicomic here skews more comic. A suicidal fish briefly offers her some company, as does her overactive imagination.
When Amélie becomes a young woman and the doe-eyed archetype of the early aughts Manic Pixie Dream Girls everywhere, she decides to bring happiness to all those she can. She returns a tin of childhood treasures to a lonely man and plays matchmaker between a waitress and a customer. While escorting a blind man to the Métro, she describes the world around them so that, if only for a moment, he can see it through her eyes.
Amélie asks a flight attendant friend to send her father pictures of his garden gnome travelling the world and convinces him to do the same. Nothing, I think, could sum up the film's intent better than this quote from its narrator: 'Amélie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It's a perfect moment. A soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. A surge of love, an urge to help mankind overcomes her.'
I should, ethically, issue a disclaimer here. If director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's credentials as a French man might lead you to believe that his Paris is a truthful depiction of the place, then you might be mistaken. This Paris is less Godard than it is a Technicolor lovechild of the city we see in Emily in Paris and the one from Ratatouille (the runner-up for my feelgood film of choice). It is fun, fantastical, and simply does not exist. This certainly doesn't absolve Amélie of, as per one critic's suggestion, magicking away 'the inappropriate realities of poverty and racism'. But these issues are deserving of just a sidelong glance from a feelgood film and there is, I hope, some value in choosing to escape the real world every once in a while.
After completing several good deeds, Amélie falls in love with the elusive Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a sex shop employee who likes to collect strangers' photobooth pictures. I like that this part reminds me how deeply we can care about people we don't yet know. Living in as many cities as I have, I am always touched by the kindness of strangers: volunteers at workers' and tenants' unions who give their time to help me; bystanders who, at their own risk, have protected me when I've been alone on nights out. Although Amélie's kindness might be the apotheosis of whimsy, it's radical in its own way – a quiet protest against the indifference and self-interest that seem to rule city life.
We see, too, how Amélie delights in tiny joys like cracking creme brulee with a spoon and skimming stones on Canal Saint-Martin. At the risk of being twee, I have also cultivated my own taste for small pleasures over the years. Thumbing through old postcards in antique shops and the sound of woodpigeons in the morning make me very happy, and proudly so. My relationship spawned out of a long-distance friendship fuelled by lengthy exchanges about what we love and thought the other would, too; in Amélie and that fact alone, I feel flooded with the sense that these or things like these can make for a pretty wonderful life.
Amélie is available to rent digitally in the US