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To hear the French tell it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film hasn't only saved French cinema as we know it, it's saved France.
Frederic Bonnaud rains on the parade.
Right from the start Le Fabuleux destin d' Amelie Poulain, or Amelie as it's now called in the U.S., was a runaway hit in France-the film has managed to sell seven and a half million tickets, which translates into roughly $40 million at the box office, a sum rarely achieved by French films at home. Our film industry is breathing a collective sigh of relief: we've got a hit! The miracle began with the first press screenings: everyone loved it, and even the most hardened critics applauded enthusiastically as they wept for joy. When Amelie was released in late April of this year, even serious newspapers like Liberation and Le Monde discreetly took part in the general euphoria. All of which led to one big question, which quickly flared into a controversy: why wasn't Amelie representing France at the Cannes Film Festival? Extremely embarrassed by the scale of the phenomenon, the Festival directors let it be known through a press leak that the selection committee had seen only a workprint without music, and thus were unable to appreciate the film's true worth. Then, to make matters worse, the film's lead actor, Mathieu Kassovitz, who was on the Cannes jury, announced with his customary tact that if it had been up to him, not only would the film have been in competition at Cannes, it would also have taken home the Palme d'Or! In May, as the paradise for artists and intellectuals that is Cannes unfolded in its auteurist ghetto and as France belatedly discovered the subtleties of reality TV with the broadcast of Loft Story (France's equivalent to Big Brother), the country only had eyes for Amelie....
Back from Cannes, exhausted but pleased with the high standard of the festival's lineup, I convinced my Inrockuptibles colleague Serge Kaganski to go with me to see Amelie, at a regular theater with a regular audience. We had missed the press screenings and hadn't said a word about it in the magazine, as much due to crass professional incompetence as total indifference to the film's box-office success.
After seeing films...