![]() ![]() She painstakingly designs a handwritten letter for her concierge, and rigs her grocer’s house She slyly incepts ideas into her colleague and father’s heads with well-timed gossip and globe-trotting gnomes. ![]() She doesn’t simply deliver the souvenirs to the stranger he is unsuspectingly lured into a phonebooth only to ‘discover’ the box there. And in a manner that renews their faith in fate. She affects people, indirectly, in creative ways that marry her introverted spirit of seclusion with her extroverted affection for escapade. She even teaches her rude neighbourhood grocer a lesson.Īmélie executes these forged deceptions of destiny like an artist weaving hidden symbols into complex artwork. She inspires her mournful father to travel the world. She fools the bitter concierge into believing that her cheating husband had sent her a conciliatory letter before his death. She plays cupid by triggering an improbable romance between her fragile co-worker and a difficult customer. She reunites a reclusive man with memories from his childhood. To inject life with her grammar of imagination, Amélie elevates humanity from noun to adjective. When she finds a box of someone’s old souvenirs, Amélie chooses to rebrand fact as the escapist fiction that kept her adolescence afloat. She is tired of viewing them as bullet points of likes and dislikes. As a waitress working at a cafe, Amélie’s disenchantment with people – their puerile predictability, their wasteful routine – reaches its peak. By the time she moved away, she had already taken refuge in a make-believe world where every moment has a feeling. Amélie grew up with neurotic and distant parents. Introverts are essentially people disappointed with the concept of people. Over time, I’ve learned that the madness lies in the failed method of this romance. Over time, however, as I’ve struggled with the paradoxical pitfalls of adult companionship, my personal focus has shifted to Amélie Poulain’s love story. It looked like a token insert, reiterating the long-standing cinematic misconception that a losing protagonist can only be rescued by the emergence of a soulmate. For once, silence sung a voice.Īmélie’s infatuation with a strange young man felt like an afterthought. Loneliness felt hopeful – more like an acquired superpower than a hereditary disease. A gaze was reinvented: Mundanity became an adventure of repetition, ordinariness became a playground of possibility, and fantasy became both ailment and cure. The portrait of a sad and dreamy frog in a well wore the vibrant energy of a happy beast in the wild. As an introvert, I felt represented: the vivid primary colour palette, Yann Tiersen’s melancholic music, the quirky characters and eccentric vignettes.Īmélie had canonised the language of isolation. I was 21 when I first watched Jean-Pierre Jeunet’sĪmélie, a French film about a 23-year-old Parisian waitress.
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