She’ll change your life. Oh, okay, maybe not _your_ life. But she’ll certainly steal your heart.

This is a delightful film, an absolute, unremitting pleasure to watch. Amélie is a solitary young woman who by chance has the opportunity to do something unexpected and wonderful for a stranger. When she sees what a positive change this brings about in his life, she imagines herself as the “Madonna of the Unloved” and sets out to anonymously make everyone’s life better. Everyone in her little social circle, that is. Her methods are imaginative and clever and silly and fun to watch. Not to mention the fact that Audrey Tautou is simply a pleasure to look at: her expressions are so refreshing and winsome and she can convey a simple sweetness in just a glance.

And throughout her forays into doing good, she has an extended conversation with a neighbor (to whom she is also anonymously tending), about taking risks and extending oneself. Because, of course, Amelie takes no credit for the many gifts she brings to others. But this also means that she holds herself back from the young man to whom she is drawn. She starts forward and then stops herself, draws closer and then backs up again. And her neighbor, seeing this, talks with her about the courage and daring that is required to open one’s heart. In keeping with the film, her counselor is a recluse.

It is no spoiler to say that the movie ends happily. That being said, of course, the whole point is that there is no courage required if there is no risk of rejection. That Amélie takes his advice and that she receives her heart’s desire (and that there simply is no chance that the film could end otherwise) doesn’t mean that such will happen for everyone (and doesn’t mean that the film is just fluff). Instead, it is braving the fear that is the point – not the result of the action, but the action itself.

Amélie, the film, reminded me of Wings of Desire both in its life affirming themes and in the laundry lists of minor occurrences that are read here and there in both films, pointing to “a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.” But Amélie is much more accessible, partly because the grains of sand that it examines tend to be beautiful or funny or neutral and those of Wings of Desire tend to be a little more thought provoking and not necessarily amusing. But also, Amélie is a visually stimulating film in a way that Wings of Desire is not. The quickly passing moments of Amélie’s childhood at the beginning of the film have flashes of brilliance, such as the shot of her eating raspberry caps off her fingertips, and the colors of the film are tremendous. The peek we get inside the heads of many of the characters, learning their likes and dislikes, is consistently funny and always insightful, and could not have existed in Wings of Desire because of the balance of sad with happy that is essential to that film. Amélie includes moments of fantasy, in which the pictures on her walls make faces at the audience; moments of metaphor, in which she melts into a literal puddle of water on the floor when the boy she yearns for leaves the restaurant; moments of dreamy anticipation in which her life as she wishes it plays out in her mind, visible to us; moments of whimsy, in which a photograph tells the boy his opinion of Amélie (four opinions, actually, since there are four prints of the same picture). Each character is vividly drawn, each with his or her own peculiarities, and the fit of Amélie with her boy is a perfect one, since they each, in their own way, like to put peoples’ scrambled lives back together.

What is interesting to me is that I didn’t find the film cloying – because it certainly could be, and in the wrong hands the story would have been too sappy for words. But I think what saves it from that awful fate is the homely truth of the eccentricities of people that is used here both for the lessons it provides and the amusement it brings. I have purposely not given details of Amélie’s acts of goodness, precisely because it is in the unfolding of them that the delight of this film lies.

I am also tempted to write, and so I add as an addendum, that Amélie illustrates a couple of solid Buddhist concepts. First, the concept of “bodhichitta,” or the awakened heart/mind, teaches us that with wisdom grows compassion, so that the one who sees clearly sees humanity with great love. Amélie’s boundless love for the people surrounding her, in which she asks for nothing in return (if they like it, wonderful, if not, “tant pis”), is a lovely example of that.

That not all of her efforts are exactly nice, shall we say, that she does exact a small revenge on a particularly nasty person, is a good example of the difficulty of bodhichitta.

But also, with particular reference to Trungpa Rinpoche and Pema Chodron (one of his best known students), Amélie has by the end of the film become a “Warrior of the Heart,” in the sense that she allows her heart to open to all the possibilities, including that her heart might be broken, in order to become fully alive.

This is a charming and remarkable film and one that I can’t recommend highly enough. It is so rare to find something so optimistic about human nature, yet simultaneously so revealing. It does my heart good to see a film like this in these troubled times. See it.




Peace.

May all beings be free from suffering.

May the merit of my meditation and any good acts I undertake be dedicated to the happiness and liberation of all beings.

~ ~ ~
All meetings end in separation
All acquisition ends in dispersion
All life ends in death
- The Buddha

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Every hundred years, all new people