

The movie is deep and takes Amélie's inner struggle seriously, but it's never heavy.

Amélie's conflict is what rounds out the picture and makes it complete. As she continues enriching the lives around her, Amélie becomes challenged with the fact that if she only helps others anonymously, she may live her life alone and without the happiness she brings others. This is only one in a mountain of selfless deeds she does to make people happy. One particularly wonderful scene shows Amélie helping a blind man across the street and rapidly describing what's happening around them to give him a picture of the world he doesn't get to see. Amélie goes about this with great success. What she finds behind that tile leads her to the decision that she is going to do what she can to make the people around her happier by whatever means possible. The film tells the story of French waitress Amélie (Audrey Tautou.) She is in her early twenties, lead a gloomy childhood and is missing something in her life until hearing of the Death of Princess Diana causes her to drop the cap of a bottle which rolls along the floor and dislodges a tile on her bathroom wall. Yes it is heart warming, but not in the phony Wal-Mart commercial sense but in the sense of how good you feel when laughing with a dear, dear friend. Here is a film so original, so funny, and so warm that it left me with smiling for hours and the people on the sidewalk thinking I was crazy. You can add "le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain" to that list. Some that come to mind include "The Wizard of Oz", "American Beauty" and "Vertigo." These movies are so distinct and original that they seem to have created there own spot in the universe, untouchable by anything else. Not a lot of movies create their own sort of universe.
