What: Audrey Tautou glides through Montmartre, trying to save the world while avoiding the problems in her own life. For all of its dreamy atmosphere, Amélie is, at heart, a film about everyday details, where the mundane is saturated to the point of wonder.
Comparable to: As with Pushing Daisies, it's tempting to take one look at the hard-candy-colored appearance, hear five beats of the bright and expansive music (in this case, from Yann Tiersen), and dismiss the whole thing as escapism.
Once you actually pay attention to the content, though, you realize that Amélie's world is filled with people in comas, people with debilitating diseases, people committing suicide, people stalled in their lives, people going to funerals, people living on the street, and people who can't help sabotaging themselves. And that not all of them get happy endings.
Opening lines:
"On September 3rd 1973, at 6:28pm and 32 seconds, a bluebottle fly capable of 14,670 wing beats a minute landed on Rue St Vincent, Montmartre. At the same moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat, 28 Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugène Colère erased his name from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphaël Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amélie Poulain was born."
How to get it: Buy it, borrow it, stream it on Amazon.
Connections to previous Wreckage: Season one of Pushing Daisies was Rec. #233.
Amélie's writer-director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, also wrote and directed Micmacs (Rec. #74), which is all about a group of misfits getting revenge on weapons manufacturers.
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