Word: jeunet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...AMELIE FROM MONTMARTRE A shy girl with a runaway imagination (Audrey Tautou) forces magic on all those in her Paris neighborhood. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's scurrying narrative and cinematic gamesmanship (a style that could be called faux Truffaut) may at times weary viewers used to Hollywood's burlier, spell-it-all-out mode. But give me, any day, a film that offers a groaning banquet table of invention and enchantment--and a showcase for world-class beguiler Tautou...
...developed a friendship between a female anorexic and her overweight neighbor?only for the larger woman to eat the anorexic. Dogs, directed by first-time helmer Bong Joon Ho, takes on a lesser taboo in a manner reminiscent of another of this year's inspired works, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie from Montmartre. Both Bong and Jeunet have an eye for eccentric detail, produce a bagful of tricks and visual kink and find the most unlikely "feel good factor." Dogs' bark is more hysterical and a notch or two rougher than Amelie. Part Hitchcock's Rear Window, part Monty Python...
...lack and one where the director has so much to say and show that he can't keep his images still. You could get drunk, or ill, on the high dose of whimsy in Amelie. That's fine--too many European movies suffer from emotional constipation and camera anomie. Jeunet travels the road of excess, telling dozens of peripheral tales, cueing American tunes from the '40s to play in a '90s Paris cafe, working in whatever style suits the moment, letting a key in Amelie's pocket radiate to signal intrigue, or literally dissolving her into a puddle of water...
...Jeunet, whose previous film was the Hollywood Alien Resurrection, was eager to make a picture back home. "I love L.A.," he says, "but it's a place, it's not a city. I wanted to move to Montmartre, to live in Paris." Amelie was to be played by Emily Watson, but when she bowed out, the first actress he tested was Tautou. "And I thought, Is it real? No, I saw the test on video. She's perfect. Each day during the shoot, I said, 'You're perfect. Do exactly like in the test...
...Jeunet's Amelie will hope to do the same: open your eyes. Look around, the film says, and not just at the usual exhibitionists. There's magic and heartbreak in the shiest creature. Finally, with her lover's sleeping head in her arms, Amelie realizes she has someone else to love: herself. And that is her fabulous destiny...