By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s much adored whimsical French classic Amelie starring Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz and Dominique Pinon.
Gilles Jacob – the director of The Cannes Film Festival – described Amelie as “uninteresting” when asked why it wasn’t selected to feature in the 2000 festival. I happen to agree with his assessment. Oh yes, I know I know, the screen is lit up with photography that wouldn’t look out of place in The Louvre, but I don’t go to the cinema to see pretty images. I go to be entertained and to watch a story unfold. I was utterly bored.
Amelie is the story of a pretty young nutcase who falls for a funny-looking nerd who she’s never even met. Okay, my synopsis is simplified, but that’s the general idea. There’s rarely a day that goes by in my dank cellar that doesn’t include a sordid fantasy about Amelie lead actress Audrey Tautou, so to see her running around after a man like that, played by La Haine director Mathieu Kassovitz no less, is extremely annoying.
For the record, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Paris, and if you go there after seeing this film, you’ll believe that you got off at the wrong stop. That isn’t the Paris that I know. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is guilty of “pulling a Woody” by romanticising the so-called City Of Love out of all realistic proportions, and the movie borders on science fiction because of it. He’s completely deluding himself. For the non-traveller amongst you, he’s basically made Parramatta look like Port Douglas. You get the idea.
Amelie represents everything bad and pretentious about French cinema. The film is so obsessed with style that the substance of the piece invariably suffers throughout. They may as well be saying, ‘Oh, we’re European! Aren’t we trendy? Our films have vague, hidden meanings and are beautifully shot’. Yes? Well, give me Die Hard 4.0 any day of the week. If there’s something more annoying about the film than the flashy style, it’s the ridiculous narrator who does exactly zero to move the story along and only adds to the pomposity of the overall piece. Why do writers get such an erection for what amounts to nothing more than lazy exposition? I’m getting angry just thinking about it.
Come to think of it, Gilles Jacob was complimentary when he called it “uninteresting”. Try ostentatious, self-indulgent, nonsensical, showy tripe. Come to think of it, it would have been absolutely perfect for Cannes…
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against The Social Network, Argo, Gravity, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, The Artist, Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
