Amelie

The 2001 French flick Amelie features Audrey Tautou as the main character Amelie. Amelie is a young girl that has had a very troubling life. She lost her mother as a child and her dad never showed affection to her. She goes through life day after day without any sense of meaning or direction. It’s like nothing really excites her and it seems she feels nothing. Then one day she decides to help all the people in her life. With every smile from their faces, she starts to feel again. Happiness starts to become the bright part of her every day. The more she helps others, the more she begins to help herself. It’s like karma looked at what she was doing and granted her the opportunity to become happy. It took a little convincing from her old friend, but she realized what she had to do before it was too late.

This movie has one main and very powerful program objective. It shows how happy we can become when we make others happy. Amelie was nothing at the beginning of the movie, but a weird girl that did things that many people get institutionalized for. Then she made the choice to help others with their problems and lives. Once she started, she just couldn’t stop. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to her and the people around her. That’s all we need to do in life. When we help others, we really help ourselves and what really could be better. As Amelie showed us, after we help others sooner or later, karma will help us to a little happiness.

From a personal point, the only part of this movie that I actually enjoyed was how it used really creative images and the surprise ending. I am not a fan of all the crazy sex scenes and stuff like that, but I love ending that I could not predict. Sure, it always is a happy ending in every movie, but how it gets there makes the movie good or bad. Then this movie shows us a kind of subjective point of view, by showing us Amelie’s view point and her emotional struggle. As bad as this movie’s acting is, the camera work to show Amelie’s life story was pretty impressive. I think that was the only reason that Amélie won best film at the European Film Awards, four César Awards (including Best Film and Best Director), two BAFTA Awards (including Best Original Screenplay), and was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Finally, when I started to watch this film, I honestly thought that this movie was going to be terrible and that’s not because of the subtitles. It just had a weird and awkward start, but then it really surprised me. I didn’t except it to be as good as it was. They really should have had better actors in it and less sex scenes, but other than that it was pretty good. I really enjoyed how well it was organized and how well the story line was followed. It is a movie that most can watch and then try to be more helpful to others like Amelie.