The fabulous world of Amélie

Movie
German title	The fabulous world of Amélie
Original title	Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain
Country of production	France , Germany
original language	French
Publishing year	2001
length	122 minutes
Age rating	FSK 6 ; JMK 6
Rod
Director	Jean-Pierre Jeunet
script	Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillaume Laurant
production	Jean-Marc Deschamps , Claudie Ossard
music	Yann Tiersen
camera	Bruno Delbonnel
cut	Hervé Schneid
occupation
	Audrey Tautou : Amélie Poulain; Mathieu Kassovitz : Nino Quincampoix; Rufus : Raphaël Poulain; Lorella Cravotta : Amandine Poulain; Serge Merlin : Raymond Dufayel; Jamel Debbouze : Lucien; Clotilde Mollet : Gina; Claire Maurier : Suzanne, cafe owner; Dominique Pinon : Joseph; Isabelle Nanty : Georgette; Artus de Penguern : writer Hipolito; Urbain Cancelier : Monsieur Collignon; Yolande Moreau : Madame Wallace; Maurice Bénichou : Dominique Bretodeau; Michel Robin : Collignon's father; Andrée Damant : Collignon's mother; Claude Perron : Eva, Nino's colleague; Armelle : Philomene, flight hostess; Ticky Holgado : Talking photo; Flora Guiet : Amélie as a child; André Dussollier : Narrator's voice (German version: Peter Fricke );

The fabulous world of Amélie (original title: Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain , dt. The fairytale fate of Amélie Poulain ) is a Franco-German feature film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet from 2001 with Audrey Tautou in the title role. The soundtrack comes from Yann Tiersen . The film grossed $ 140 million worldwide, including 33 million in the United States.

action

Amélie Poulain is born in a suburb of Paris as the daughter of a military doctor a. D. and a teacher. The girl receives little attention from her family and no physical contact in the form of hugs or caresses from her father. The only touches for the child come about during the regular medical examinations. Amélie's heart always beats like mad and her father wrongly diagnoses her with a heart defect. That is why they are not allowed to go to public school; she is tutored by her mother and has no contact with other children. As a substitute for this, she invents her own fantasy world, into which she withdraws more and more.

Amélies goldfish called "Sperm Whale" suffers from depression and has tried several times to commit suicide by jumping out of the goldfish bowl. The fish lying on the ground and gasping for breath makes Amélie scream every time, which in turn drives her parents to despair. One day they can no longer bear it and release the goldfish in a body of water nearby. Soon afterwards, Amélie's mother is killed in front of her eyes by a tourist who throws herself to death at the Notre-Dame Cathedral . Amélie's father can't get over it. He retires and spends his time building a miniature mausoleum for the urn containing his wife's ashes.

Years later, Amélie moved out of her parents' house as a young woman and worked as a waitress in the Café des 2 Moulins . Although her everyday life seems rather gray, she finds joy in the little things in life, such as B. jumping pebbles over the Canal Saint-Martin , watching people in the cinema or cracking the crust of crème brûlée with a spoon.

While the death of Lady Diana was reported on television on August 31, 1997 , Amélie accidentally discovers a small box behind a loose bathroom tile that contains the “treasures” of a boy from the 1950s. She decides to return the box to its owner and, if he should be touched, to spend the rest of her life helping other people. In fact, she can track down Dominique Bretodeau and send him the box. He is deeply moved and Amélie takes pleasure in her new role. So she secretly steals his garden gnome from her father and gives it to a friend who works as a stewardess. From then on, Amélie's father received photos of his garden gnome on a journey from all over the world , which ultimately prompted him to travel himself. In addition, Amélie punishes Monsieur Collignon, the bossy owner of a greengrocer who treats his employee badly, she pairs her colleague Georgette, the conceited sick woman, with the jealous Joseph and she makes the concierge of her house happy again by missing a love letter from her decades ago Lover fakes.

Amélie repeatedly meets a collector of discarded pictures from photo booths , Nino Quincampoix. When she finds the album he has lost, she recognizes him as a soul mate and falls in love with him. She sends him messages in various, meticulously worked out ways, but fails again and again shortly before the meeting because of her insecurity. Only after the old painter Raymond Dufayel, who lives in the same house and who has never really enjoyed life because of his glass bone disease , has convinced her to finally open her heart and believe in her own happiness, she dares, Nino personally to face. And so the two finally come together.

production

Café des 2 Moulins in the Montmartre district of Paris (15 Rue Lepic)

Ali Mdoudhy's Au Marché de la Butte vegetable shop on the corner of Rue des Trois Frères and Rue Androuet

Creation and pre-production

Stairs at the Gare de l'Est

In 1974, Jean-Pierre Jeunet began to jot down ideas and memories that form the basis of the film. The idea of collecting passport photos from machines was already used in 1981 by the Berlin artist group Die Tödliche Doris in the film Material for the Post-War Period (25 min.). As in The Fabulous World of Amélie , the films consist of passport photos filmed one after the other with an immobile camera, some of which have discoloration, creases and abrasions, which have been torn and partly incompletely reassembled. Originally Emily Watson was supposed to take on the role of Amélie. However, since she did not speak French and had already signed for another film, this collaboration did not materialize.

Filming

Was shot u. a. in the Parisian Café des 2 Moulins , in the Gare du Nord train station , outside at the Gare de l'Est and at the Sacré-Cœur church , where today some fans of the film graffiti in the form of the blue arrows from the "Scavenger hunt" scene to the respective places have sprayed. Since the film was financially supported by the Filmstiftung NRW , the interior shots of the film were shot in the Coloneum in Cologne . The German painter Michael Sowa contributed some bizarre furnishing details. The pig lamp was created by him, as were some of the pictures in Amélie's room, which can be seen in the background.

For the TV sequence, which suddenly refers to Amélie's life in the subtitles ("Raymond Dufayel's attempt at interference is unacceptable. If Amélie would rather live in her dream world and remain an introverted young woman, then that is her right. Because the right to a failed life is inviolable! ”), a sequence from the second part of the four-part Soviet film epic Blockade (1974) about the siege of Leningrad in World War II was used.

The painting that the character Raymond Dufayel, the painter with the vitreous bone disease , keeps repainting is The Breakfast of the Rowers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir .

Film music

A recurring theme in the score by Georges Delerue for the film Jules and Jim by François Truffaut is varied several times as the main theme by Yann Tiersen in his music for this film.

synchronization

Beate Klöckner was responsible for the dialogue book and the dialogue direction on behalf of Neue Tonfilm .

role	actor	Voice actor
teller	André Dussollier	Peter Fricke
Amélie Poulain	Audrey Tautou	Katherina May
Nino Cincampoix	Mathieu Kassovitz	Philipp Brammer
Raphaël Poulain	Rufus	Leon Rainer
Amandine Poulain	Lorella Cravotta	Bettina Redlich
Raymond Dufayel	Serge Merlin	Horst Sachtleben
Gina	Clotilde Mollet	Claudia Kleiber
Lucien	Jamel Debbouze	Florian Halm
Suzanne	Claire Maurier	Ilona Grandke
Joseph	Dominique Pinon	Dirk Galuba
Georgette	Isabelle Nanty	Michele Sterr
Monsieur Collignon	Urbain Cancelier	Michael Habeck
Madame Wallace	Yolande Moreau	Inge Solbrig
Dominique Bretodeau	Maurice Bénichou	Ivar Combrinck
Dominique Bretodeau	Valérie Zarrouk	Michèle Tichawsky
Old woman	Christiane Bopp	Ursula Traun
old man	Guillaume Viry	Gerd Potyka
Eve	Claude Perron	Petra Einhoff
Man on photo	Ticky Holgado	Ole Pfennig
Porter	Marie-Laure Descoureaux	Ruth Küllenberg
Newspaper woman	Frankie Pain	Anita Höfer
writer	Arthur de Penguern	Michael Schwarzmaier

Awards

At the ceremony of Césars 2002 won Amélie as Best Film , the Best Director , the Best Original Score and Best Art Direction . He was also nominated in nine other categories, including Best Original Screenplay and Audrey Tautou for Best Actress . The Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma also recognized the production as the best French film .

At the 2001 European Film Awards , the film won in four categories: Best European Film , Best Director , Best Cinematography and the Jameson Audience Award for Best Director . Audrey Tautou was also nominated for Best Actress .

The film was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 in the five categories of Best Production Design , Best Cinematography , Best Foreign Language Film , Best Original Screenplay and Best Sound , but it could not prevail in any of the categories. Even with the Golden Globes , the film was as Best Foreign Language Film nomination. The film received awards in the same category at the Guldbagge Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Spanish Goya Awards, among others . With nine nominations, the film won two British Academy Film Awards in 2002 for Best Original Screenplay and Best Production Design .

The film was nominated for two Chlotrudis Awards and won in the Best Picture category (Audience Award) . The film won the Lumières Prize for Best Screenplay .

In September 2002 the film received the golden screen for over 3 million viewers .

In 2016, The Fabulous World of Amélie ranked 87th in a BBC survey of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating “particularly valuable”.

criticism

The commercially highly successful film received good reviews both in France and internationally. Serge Kaganski, an author of the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles , accused the film of conveying an idealized version of French society to the audience and depicting a thoroughly stylized and kitschy Paris. It also seems to be part of the director's strategy that ethnic minorities and homosexuals in particular are hardly represented in the film, although it is precisely these population groups that shape the everyday cityscape of the 18th arrondissement in which the film takes place. Kaganski's criticism culminated in the accusation that “Amélie” was a commercial for Le Pen . Both the director Jeunet and the actor Mathieu Kassovitz firmly rejected this criticism.

The film did not make it into the official competition at the 2001 Cannes International Film Festival because Gilles Jacob, who was responsible for selecting the film, said it was "uninteresting". This caused a larger public debate, as the rejection was interpreted in many places as a contradiction to the great media interest in the film and as a decision "against the audience". Jean-Pierre Jeunet responded to the rejection by bringing the film forward to theatrical release; “Amélie” now ran parallel to the ongoing festival.