Le fabuleux destin d' Poulain

Our loyal readers may have noticed that there have not been very many movie review postings lately. There are two reasons for this: our movie watching has slowed down, of late, and I am just way behind writing anything up on the few we have seen. (For one thing, B has been working furiously on an article all semester that just got turned in this week -- yay!). So we'll try to get back up to date. And if that means we just don't go back for some that we've watched and haven't reviewed, well, so be it.

But one we couldn't possibly leave out is Le fabuleaux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001), or, as it is known in English: Amelie. I didn't know anything about it except that it was terribly popular. My sister told me it was a "must-see," or we might never have put it in our queue. We absolutely loved it!

We were a little frustrated the first time we watched it, as reading the subtitles prevented us from seeing everything that was going on, and there is a lot going on. To make up for this, we watched the movie again the next night. By then, we didn't have to watch every word to know what was happening, and it was like watching it again for the first time. The movie is just moving enough to not be completely silly. But it is silly enough to be great fun. I can see why some have found Amelie's impishness to be irritating -- or a least easy to mock -- but that just seems miserly to me. The film is very nicely done. It's artistic, funny, sweet, sad, frustrating, and exhilarating. Any warmhearted person will find something in Amelie to love.