![]() ![]() And also Georgette, her hypochondriac colleague. So, she helps the janitor of her apartment complex, who drinks port all day while talking to her stuffed dog. But then she discovers her ultimate life goal: to solve other people's problems. She’s merely living her life as a woman in the world and perhaps that’s feminist enough.Amélie Poulain works as a waitress in a café in Paris's Montmartre district and enjoys observing people while letting her imagination run wild. Is Amélie a feminist? This is more challenging to answer as the character isn’t out to serve women’s rights or promote them. Audrey Tautou provides us with a sweet and inspired journey to connect with others, whether romantically or otherwise. Amélie is childlike and playful but her interactions with the world have meaning and the way she participates in the world makes sense given her background. I was pleasantly surprised – and a little relieved – that my memory of this film was wrong. In a sense, he is also speaking to the audience members who are missing the zest for life! Amélie and Nino both enhance the mystery and excitement of meeting each other with their shy-yet-adventurous scavenger hunts and curious train station notes. However, Nino, is an imaginative dreamer as well! He is interested in the puzzle of ripped-up and left-behind photos taken in train photo booths and works in both a sex shop and a carnival. I thought they were showing her providing excitement to a character who would otherwise be uninteresting. Her interest in getting this man’s attention leads him on an adventure and, having not seen the film for nearly twenty years (it came out in 2001), I was misremembering these moments. This is the part in the film where my memory of Amélie was skewed to believe she was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. ![]() Amélie replaces his slippers with a smaller size, swap the handles on his bathroom door, and changes his speed dial contacts.Īmidst her efforts to brighten the lives of those around her (with that one exception), Amélie finds herself becoming enamored with a man she repeatedly sees in the train station gathering remnants of photos from the station’s photo booth. She is also inspired to subtly sabotage Collignon, the shopkeeper who has no qualms about gossiping and who hurls insults at those with gentler spirits. Throughout the course of the film, Amélie finds herself inspired to create magic in the lives of others from the shop employee who cares for endives to an artist whose bones are as fragile as glass. This allows us to understand her character isn’t so much impish as she is innocent and imaginative. Amélie (2001) – source: Miramaxĭirector Jean-Pierre Jeunet has explained her background through a short stylistic chronology of her childhood including a “neurotic” mother and an “iceberg” father, a home-schooled education, and no friends beyond her imagination, due to a perceived health condition by her father. The latter is just one of many reasons why Amélie doesn’t fall into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl category. Amélie strikes me as this type of character initially but, rather than doing so to benefit the male characters in the film, she seems to be doing so for audience members who are missing the zest for life. Manic Pixie Dream Girls have no story arc or development that would lead a character to have depth - they’re merely cute, quirky, and frequently childlike or mischievous. These characters don’t exist for themselves within the confines of the film but rather for (generally-speaking) male characters who need to learn to have a zest for life. Oftentimes quirky or whimsical women in film tend to fall into the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” such as Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown or Natalie Portman in Garden State. ![]() Yekum Ane - Channel Trailer 2020 Is Amélie a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?Īmélie is a quirky, charismatic, whimsical film and so is the titular character. ![]()
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