
Abbesses, the hip part, is just up the hill from the Moulin Rouge. On the southern foot of the hill is Pigalle with its seedy strip clubs and the Moulin Rouge. Its bohemian reputation comes from the fact that artists like Renoir and Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec lived and worked there. If you've never been to Montmartre, it's on a hill in the north of the city. However, the iconic stone-skimming scene is from Canal Saint-Martin, a few kilometres south-east of Montmartre. And her trail of arrows leads Nino up the park at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur, now a hugely popular tourist venue since that scene. Amélie's metro line is the 12: she encounters a beggar playing records on the platform at Abbesses, while her descriptive tour for the blind man ends at the entrance to Lamarck-Caulincourt. Similarly, the greengrocery is a real shop on rue des Trois Frères. The restaurant-bar, Les Deux Moulins, is a real establishment on rue Lepic - the tobacconist counter was removed a few years ago to make room for more seats but the rest is as it appears in the film. Fans can visit the key locations and we believe there's even an 'Amélie' tour of the area. The film was released in the USA as 'Amélie From Montmartre' - because Montmartre is where most of the action takes place. One rather touching scene is Amélie's daydream of Nino popping down to the shop and returning to her apartment: it rings true. And the central couple are unglamorous childlike innocents who seem lost in the nightmare of a cynical modern world, especially in the context of Diana's shocking death - Amélie is timid like a mouse and Nino (the world's most unlikely sex industry employee) keeps a scrapbook collection of ghostly discarded passport photos. The supporting characters all have some touch of sadness or bitterness in their hearts - the failed writer, two jilted lovers, the hypochondriac tobacconist, the fragile old painter and the bar owner who was crippled when her lover literally let her down. Fortunately for diabetics in the audience, most hints of saccharine are neutralised by a dark strand of tragicomedy - especially in the flashback to Amélie's childhood (her mother's bizarre death, for instance). When Amélie's bedroom ornaments start discussing her romantic problems while she sleeps, it should be clear that this isn't docudrama or cinema verité.Īnd some others just hated it because they thought it was schmaltz. But the film is clearly meant to be as whimsical and escapist as its title character.
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It's true that the Paris of 'Amélie' is surprisingly free of street detritus, ethnic groups - and tourists. It's often considered to be the anti-'Amélie'.)
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(Ironically again, the male lead in 'Amélie', Kassovitz, directed 'La Haine', that searing portrayal of ethnic tension in suburban France and the other internationally-well-known French movie of the period. Critics questioned the film's racial balance: the only main non-white character is Lucien the much-bullied mentally/physically disabled shop assistant (played by stand-up comic Jamel Debbouze, who really does have a withered right arm like his character), and there's a rather superfluous scene on a train platform where Amélie feels intimidated by a group of black teenage boys.

It emerged that Jeunet had digitally removed from location shots any graffitti, dog turds and other such unwanted street details.

Sure enough, there were many French people who didn't see its charms and questioned the popular perception of the film as being representative of the real Paris and France. And the interiors were shot in a studio in Cologne, the film being co-produced by a German company.) Only because Watson was committed to Robert Altman's 'Gosford Park' was the screenplay reworked and recast with the relatively unknown Tautou. (Ironically, the film was originally written to star Emily Watson and to have much of the action in London. It also pleased conservatives who saw the film as somehow embodying traditional French community values - a dangerous idea to be floating in that Le Pen-marked era. In France the movie's old-fashioned optimism captured the country's imagination and added to the buoyant mood created by the national football team's World Cup and European Championship successes. But when she falls for the idiosyncratic Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) she's too shy to take her own chance of happiness.

You surely know the scenario by now: in the aftermath of Princess Diana's fatal Paris car crash in 1997, innocent daydreamer Amélie (played by Audrey Tautou) sets out to improve the lives of those around her. For English-speaking audiences, perhaps the best-known and best-loved French film of recent years is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 'Amélie', released in 2001 in France as 'Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain' ('The Fabulous Destiny Of Amélie Poulain').
