Amélie

(2001) dir. Jean-Pierre Juenet

Jean-Pierre Juenet’s third film charmed the hell out of me and made me feel really happy. I’d never seen anything so creative, so quirky, and so irreverent. It was one of those foreign films that was so acclaimed that it reached my culturally isolated hometown, and in short order it became the favorite of many people my age. The problem with Amélie now isn’t so much that it hasn’t aged well, but that after watching the films of the French New Wave, I realized that it doesn’t do anything new. Godard and Truffaut, for example, freely use narration in a similar way to Juenet. See, for example, the classic Jules and Jim (1961) by Truffaut.