Amélie

Tautou’d Life

Amélie
aka Le fabuleux
destin d'Amélie Poulain
France 2001 Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Sony Blu Ray Steelbook Zone A

Amélie or Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain* as it was known in its own country, is easily one of the greatest movies ever made, as far as I’m concerned. It came out at a time in my life when I’d pretty much stopped seeing films more than once at the cinema... I made an exception for this film. In fact, I went to my local film emporium thirteen times to see this and I was still moved to tears every time I saw it. And the fact that it was playing long enough in the cinemas here that I was able to revisit it every weekend demonstrates what a huge smash of a film it was... even here in the UK. Of course, it helps that my local cinema was not the gaudy Cineworld it is now (and I don’t know how long there will be a cinema near me, to be honest... there are rumblings coming from the owners of the chain again). Instead it was a UGC cinema who, while still a multiplex, were much more friendly to the idea of showing non-English speaking films and they also had money sunk into this movie.

The film stars the great Audrey Tautou as the titular Amélie, a part written originally for Emily Watson, who had to decline due to scheduling reasons. One night the news of the death of Princess Diana  on the TV causes her to accidentally discover the lost treasure of a boy who used to live in her apartment decades before... a box of playthings hidden behind the wall containing things like a miniature racing car and bicycle... which leads to her, once reuniting this box of goodies with their original owner, onto a path of doing anonymous good deeds for people... and visiting comical retribution on certain others. But can she find her way to the heart of the oddball man she has spied from a distance, played by director Mathieu Kassovitz?

Director Jeunet brings a few of his old cast form Delicatessen (reviewed here) back for this one, such as Rufus and the always watchable Dominique Pinon plus a cast of strange faces playing off kilter characters, weaving together a breakneck paced story of strange incidents (as is his style) and filling the story with enough charm and heart to make even a cold hearted blogger like myself weep uncontrollably.

It would not be amiss to describe the film as a magical experience, with the surreal experiences of the strong imagination of the title character juxtaposed with a world populated, sometimes, with manifestations of her psyche such as a friendly crocodile or a pig lamp which turns itself off in one scene. The colouring of deep reds, deep greens and yellows are almost Bava-like but maybe a bit richer and surprisingly coherent in the way they hang together in their perfect compositions. And beautful imagery... like bunnies and teddy bears made up out of the clouds as an infant Amélie takes photos of cloud formations or, when devastated in one scene as an adult, Amélie transforming and collapsing into a puddle of water... are what makes cinema the art form it’s always been.

Now there’s way too much going on in this film for me to talk about in the somewhat limited space of a blog post but I would like to say one thing about the status of the movie (or what I believe it is) and then give two samples where I think Jeunet excelled himself in pushing the art of the motion picture forward (among may other examples to be found in the film).

Firstly, when Citizen Kane came out in 1941, a film usually found at the top of most director polls of the greatest films over the decades, it was certainly innovative but it was also, in many ways (I believe), a summation of where the art of the motion picture was at the time... presenting various clever and sometimes invisible (in what went on to get certain shots, for example, into sharp focus) technical solutions which were state-of-the-art at the time. I believe that when Amélie was released in 2001... it did exactly the same, It’s certainly innovative and full of imagination but also did things which either represented or, in the case of two sequences I want to talk about next, creatively pushed what you could do with film. And remember, there’s a lot more CGI in Amélie than people realise. Objects like a small lamp being a certain colour were digitally dropped into shots to balance the colour schemes, for example... and, well, all I’m saying is Audrey Tautou does not, in real life, have a knack for skimming stones (which her character collects everywhere she goes in the story for just that purpose).

So, there are two moments (or three because one is comprised of a set up to a later moment) I want to talk about. One is a scene right near the end of the film where the director has a second piece of film playing in a quarter of a shot behind Amélie as we watch her make her ‘famous plum pie’. We see her but we also see what she’s imagining in the film over her shoulder. A day dream of her future lover coming into her apartment and creeping up on her while she’s preparing her pie. So at one point we see him creeping up from behind her (the same scene from a reverse angle) and he moves the bead curtains directly behind her to announce his presence... but Amélie snaps out of her dream because the beads behind her have simultaneously moved at the exact same time... only to look around and see it was just the cat moving the curtain. It’s a wonderful moment and the juxtaposition of two narratives, one real (in the context of the film) and the other imaginary suddenly matching up is, absolutely brilliant.

The other thing I want to talk about is the sound design in two scenes (and I’m not talking about Yann Tiersen’s absolutely amazing score, most of it needle dropped in from his old albums but some of it original and written for the film). Amélie’s landlord was abandoned by her husband in the late sixties and then died in a plane crash before reconciling with her. Amélie ‘borrows’ her old wartime letters from her once future husband, photocopies them and then pastes various words together to create a ‘lost letter’ found after forty years by the post office... a letter reaffirming the landlady’s husband’s love for her. But listen to the sound design on the scenes... once where Amélie is reading all the letters in a montage of moments and then again, later, when the landlady (played by Yolande Moreau) reads back the faked up ‘new letter’ which has arrived...

When Amélie reads each letter, a different ambient sound is heard playing in the background, signifying what country the gentleman in question was stationed at or what was going on in the background at the time the original letters were written. The photocopies are then cut up and reassembled to make a new message and aged. But later, when the landlady reads the letter for the first time, the background sound from the originals of each word are replayed, colliding in bits to signify the hodge podge nature of what she’s reading to the audience. Again, it’s a moment of brilliance in what, frankly, is a movie of brilliant moments that never let up.

I could probably go in all day on this one but I won’t... Amélie is one of the few films I know, such as Blade Runner (reviewed here) and Wonder Woman (reviewed here) where I believe I could actually write a quite thorough and enthusiastic book, if given the time and money to research. As it is, I’ll leave it here (with much more unsaid) and assume that the reader has gathered that, if Amélie is a film they haven’t seen then, they should maybe give themselves the opportunity to be won over by it in much the same way many people were (my understanding is the box office on this one was huge.... and for good reason). This one’s a real piece of cinematic art... don’t let it slip through your fingers. 

*One last thing, for those of you waiting for a super high definition version of the film. The great Severin films in America wanted to put out a high definition, 4K scan of the film last year as a companion piece to their release of Delicatessen. Alas, when they and Jeunet approached the company who owned the original negative, they were told it had been thrown out... because why would anyone need the negative once a digital scan was already in existence. So there you have it... such ignorant crimes against filmanity do still happen. I guess we won't be getting a 4K scan then.

Delicatessen

Butcher Self
In My Position

Delicatessen
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
and Marc Caro
France 1991
Studio Canal
Blu Ray Zone B

I remember when Delicatessen got released in the UK... it was early January 1992 and one of two absolutely amazing French movies released within a week of each other over here. It was around the time of my 24th birthday so both these movies, the other being Bertrand Blier’s astonishing Merci La Vie, were films I went to see in celebration of said birthday, being as I was a student in London at the time. The mid 1980s to the mid 1990s were an absolutely golden era for foreign language films at the cinema in the UK and three places I could regularly keep up with these wonderful, first run foreign language releases were the magnificent Lumiere cinema on St. Martin’s Lane, the Metro on Rupert Street and, as a last resort because their screens were much smaller but, they always had the films on at the tail end of the run in case you missed any, the Swiss Centre just off Leicester Square. None of these three cinemas are still in existence, in case you are wondering. I think I first saw Delicatessen at the Metro but both this one and Merci La Vie were seen by me a few times at different cinemas. Unfortunately an English subtitled Blu Ray of Blier’s film is not yet forthcoming... bit annoyed about that as the DVD release wasn’t as good an English translation on the subtitles as the cinema prints and VHS tape.

Delicatessen was a surprise, sleeper smash (more prints were quickly struck for the UK market) and was filmed by a duo of film makers billed as Jeunet and Caro. The former would, of course, continue to make cinematic history, especially with his other big smash hit ten years later, Amélie (aka Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain review coming soon).

And it’s a bizarre, surreal film which plays like a black comedy involving some kind of post-war event where a small delicatessen and the people who live in the flats which are part of it, are struggling to survive. It could easily be the 1940s because the visual aesthetic of the film (and various audio and visual references) certainly fit in with that period... or it could be the far future. The time setting is deliberately left vague but there’s definitely a post-war vibe to the whole thing.

The film follows the arrival of a new handyman at the flats, Louison, played by the always watchable Dominique Pinon. He is an ex-circus performer trying to make ends meet after his partner, Livingstone the monkey, was eaten by hungry survivors of... whatever has happened. He falls in love with the butcher’s daughter Julie, played by Marie-Laure Dougnac, who tries to warn him, unsuccessfully until he’s being attacked with a meat cleaver, that her father... played in a wonderfully comic book style by Jean-Claude Dreyfus... murders newcomers in the night so the tenants of the flats, played by a wonderful and diverse cast of actors giving laugh out loud funny and surreal performances, can eat the new tenants who come their way, rather than sacrifice one of their own. Everything is payed for in corn and lentils, the currency of this struggling world.

It’s a film which plays like a kind of Heath Robinson contraption of comical moments and vignettes edited together into unlikely sequences... which, I think it would be fair to say of pretty much most of this writer/director’s filmography and it is, it has to be said, an absolute joy to watch. Who can forget the sight of Julie playing her cello with Louison accompanying her on his musical saw. Or the lovemaking scene where the sound of the straining springs on a bed set the rhythm for a raucous sexual metaphor of a montage of various tenants accompanying them with comical antics of increasing pace. Or the comical and elabourate suicide attempts of one of the neighbours, who keeps getting accidentally saved by her own incompetence. Or the wonderful dance with bubbles which Louison performs for the kids on the stairway landing. Or the faction of vegetarian ‘troglodytes’, waging war against those who live above the surface. Or even... well let’s just call him ‘the frog man’ and leave it at that.

The films is witty, enchanting and has a style which absolutely draws you in to this magical world the directors have created. That this was a debut feature is remarkable... the film is so risky and confident... with its ‘dark fairytale’ vibe, where everything is played for comedy value but with a warm, beating heart at its centre.

The colours, too, are absolutely amazing. Hard to describe but like pastel tones which have been given extra colour saturation to achieve a warm, rich look. My one gripe being that I’m not totally sure I trust this new Blu Ray master by Studio Canal (a company who I dislike these days more than I used to... the 1990s was a time when I welcomed their logo at the start of a film). In the blurb at the front of the Blu Ray, one of the restoration features it lists is that they’ve ‘harmonised the grain’. I dunno, maybe that’s why, on Blu Ray, the exterior location looks like what I now realise was just a big, internal set. I mean, the ersatz is always a problem on Blu Ray restorations anyway but this sounds like something which maybe could be taking things a little too far... I need to find out what this is all about, for sure.

Either way though, Delicatessen is one of the greats of French cinema, that much is certain. It’s an absolute treat for anybody who appreciates the cinematic arts and, frankly, an essential film in my book. If you’ve not seen this you might want to run, rather than walk, to your earliest opportunity to get some eyeball time with this wonderful movie. I saw it multiple times when it came out at the cinema and, if it weren’t for the fact that I have to keep watching different things to keep this blog going, I would be watching it multiple times on Blu Ray still. This is, after all, the third format on which I’ve owned this film... anybody remember the superb Electric Picture VHS box set back in the 1990s? Still got mine!

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

Perpetual Motion Picture

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
2013 France/Canada
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Playing at UK cinemas now.

You know, there are a few directors out there who, when you look at any of their work from any part of their career, instantly prove without even trying, that the auteur theory is a legitimate and important consideration when it comes to critical contemplation of the art of film.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is just such a director.

I don’t care if he hires the same crew every time he makes a film (I suspect not) but he always manages to push, pull and cajole his workforce to make a work of art which is quintessentially, like it or not, a Jeunet film. I’d defy anyone familiar with some of his prior work, to look at his latest feature, The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, or any of his features for that matter, and not recognise his celluloid fingerprints written large for everyone to see.

Some directors are harder to decode, perhaps, and some allow their soldiers to shine through with their own little quirks as part of their own authorship to a piece, but I’m beginning to subscribe to the auteur theory more and more as I see cinema in all its different forms pass through my head at 24 frames per second, year after year. Some directors, like Jeunet, are stronger at being less shy about their particular visual and, in Jeunet’s case, aural foibles and it all makes for a strong legacy of cinematic culture which will ultimately be destroyed some day when our tiny and unimportant world comes to its natural, or more likely unnatural, end.

Jeunet’s latest film is probably one of my least favourites of his but... guess what? It’s still absolutely wonderful, thoroughly entertaining and shines like a beacon to his genius, leaving other films on the current cinematic landscape seeming impoverished and suffering from some kind of stylistic malnutrition compared to the director's characteristic richness and vivid creativity on display in The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. It doesn’t matter if I rank it lower than the majority of his other master works because, all said and done, I still found it thoroughly entertaining and engaging both in terms of the artistry with which it tells the story and, also, emotionally... it does get quite moving in a couple of places.

It doesn’t spoil things to give away some of the plot details of this movie, ones you could probably already pick up from the pre-publicity machine as it springs in to action around this release although, it has to be said, I didn’t even know this film had been made until I saw it was playing at the Haymarket this weekend... surely a film by one of the most important directors of our time needs a little more of a publicity push than this? But, anyway, as I was about to say...

T.S Spivet, played brilliantly by newcomer (to movies) Kyle Catlett, is a ten year old boy living on a farm with his Western obsessed father, played by Callum Keith Rennie (best remembered by me as one of the key cylon templates in the Battlestar Galactica reboot), his entomologist mother, played quite wonderfully and assuredly by Helena Bonham Carter, his sister (Niamh Wilson) and the shadow of his dead twin brother, Layton (Jakob Davies), who died in a “firearms accident” involving T.S in a barn. The aforementioned main protagonist, T.S, accepts the challenge he reads into a particularly stirring lecture on science and proceeds to invent, for all intents and purposes, a perpetual motion machine in the form of a “magnet wheel”... although, as he points out to people a few times, it’s not really perpetual motion generator as it will stop every 450 years or so and you will have to replace the magnets to get it going again... entropy increases, but very slowly in this case, it would seem. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington want to give Spivet an award, so he runs away from home to accept said award and.... the film tells of his preparations and adventures leading up to his acceptance of the award and accompanying fame.

The film is apparently based on the book The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen and, regrettably, I can’t tell you how well the film works in terms of its adaptation of this book since I haven’t read it myself. The book does, however, seem to have a reputation for being equally rich in its use of visual imagery so I suspect there must have been some kind of common ground if Jeunet decided to make a film of it.

The film is the first to be shot with a new kind of 3D camera (the Arri Alexa M, if that means anything to my more technically inclined readers) and I have to say that, although I’m not much impressed with the majority of the 3D element in film of the latest batch of 3D movies (I think the ones in the 1950s worked better and were certainly more honest in their blatant use of the technique for it’s gimmick value), I have to say that the 3D in this movie is absolutely superb. Not least of all because the usual brightness of Jeunet’s colour palette coupled with the 3D effect is completetly beautiful but, more than that, because Jeunet’s oft used technique of superimposing vignettes onto the main image to explain points in the narrative, often plucked straight out of the head of one of the main protagonists, is pushed even more to the fore when projected in 3D. In fact, if you get a choice between seeing a 3D and 2D version of this one I would urge you, in this particular instance, to go see it in 3D because the director has pretty much specifically designed it to be seen as such, even going as far as to use the analogy of an old 3D viewmaster in the wonderfully designed end credits.

One of the director’s other key signatures, the use of sound to illustrate or give audio clues to the visual landscape, is also very evident in The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. For instance, when we see numerous species of insects in Helena Bonham Carter’s bug collection, we hear the buzzing and general sounds of the insect world coming through on the audio mix, which probably goes in at an entirely unconscious level for most people when looking at stuff like this. That does nothing to negate the technique's potency at pushing an idea, of course. And, perhaps not a key signature, in itself, but the inclusion of one of the directors regular collaborators, Dominique Pinon in a small but key role, is another little but effective addition to the general Jeunet-ness of the film, if you will permit me the indulgence of describing it as such.

So there you have it, a lesser one of the director’s works for this particular movie goer but, certainly, a whole lot better than most of the other movies playing in cinemas this year so far. I didn’t like the musical score composed by Denis Sanacore so much on this one, in all honesty, but only because it didn’t appeal to me aesthetically... its does its job well and is appropriate to the tone of the movie, for sure. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet is yet another example of Jean-Pierre Jeunet giving us a visually complex, candy confection of a movie which, frankly, any fan of the art and science of the motion picture should dash along and swallow up before it dissappears from cinemas with as little fanfare as it arrived. There is much to be recommended in films like this... and we don’t get the opportunity to see enough of them.

The Oxford Murders

Murder Most Mathematical

The Oxford Murders Spain/UK/France 2008

Directed by Álex de la Iglesia

Contender Films Region 2

The Oxford Murders, based on a Spanish novel I’ve not read yet by Guillermo Martínez and directed by Álex de la Iglesia, is one of those rare cases where a film with little or no advertising or pre-release hype and practically no exposure in cinemas comes out of the blue and stuns you and grips you and amazes you with the absolute genius of the sum of all its parts... those parts being brilliant camera work combined with astonishing editing, fantastic performances (including some surprising cameos), amazing scripting, fascinating dialogue, haunting music and, all in all, just a general mastery of the art of the cinematic form that you wonder, when it’s over, what just hit you.

I never got the opportunity to see this at the cinema when it was initially released. I think it was only out for about a week and I remember (or maybe that should be don’t remember) there being pretty much no warning of the film other than an accidentally heard half of a radio appearance by John Hurt to bring it to my attention. I wanted to go see it but I just didn’t have a chance at the times it was showing on its limited run.

But then, a month or so later, a guy at work gave me a copy of it on DVD-R which he’d downloaded from the internet (and as per usual with such things these days, the bootleg was in the proper aspect ratio and was a crystal clear transfer). Since I wasn’t going to ever pay out for a copy of this movie without having actually seen it first, I saw no harm in accepting and watching the film in question. I’m glad I did, obviously, and have now finally gotten around to purchasing a proper DVD copy of the movie so I could rewatch this brilliant gem in an even better transfer (debatable) and pay the movie makers back for their tasty celluloid confection.

I should probably point out the irony here that, since I would never have bothered to watch this movie after I’d missed it at the cinema if a pirate hadn’t fallen into my hands, then I would never have got around to putting money into the coffers of the people who made the movie. Um... so without a pirate being available, the movie company would not be making any money off me on that product. Hmm... I’m not a big fan of pirates and this was an exception as I usually prefer to wait for the official DVD release if I like a movie (although I will happily pay out money for a dodgy copy of something that is either banned or quite old but not been made available by a film company, since that’s probably the only way I’ll get to see a particular movie in my lifetime, in some cases) but I have to say that my experience of people who watch pirate copies in general is that the movie companies are really not losing any money on these things... since these people seem to be unwilling to pay out to see these things at the cinema or on proper DVD anyway, from what I can see. So in a way, pirate copies are a way of distributing a movie to a bigger audience with a fairly minimal loss (I expect) to the rights owners.

Anyway, I’m not getting into that argument here because, as I say, I would rarely buy a pirate unless it’s somethng that a company has withheld from release because they think there’s not enough profit in it... and thankfully they’re catching up now with their mega-expensive-but-at-least-it’s-now-available archive editions, which will hopefully kill off some of the opportunities for bootlegs over the next few years... although what happens when downloads take over is anybody’s guess.

Right... lost the plot a bit there, didn’t I?

The Oxford Murders is set in the present day, in Oxford (yeah, even in the Spanish source story it’s all set in Oxford... kinda curious) but it grabs you even from the start which plunges you straight into the trenches of the First World War. One lone man is writing in a notebook right in the middle of the conflict with explosions landing around him while his fellow soldiers look on from their point of, relative, safety. John Hurt’s narrative then takes over to explain just who this great mathematician/philosopher was and why what he was writing was so important that he couldn’t wait to scrabble to safety before getting it down. We then cut to present day and a lecture by John Hurt’s character which is telling this tale to a spellbound audience. We then flash just a little back in time to meet the other main male lead, played by Elijah Wood, before catching up to this lecture again where Wood trys to get Hurt’s attention.

I really don't want to say much about the details of the plot but the murders soon start and these murders appear to be based on a series of logically progressing symbols as our two main leads attempt to help the police with their enquiries (cue bumbling Police Inspector stereotype) where everyone is a suspect and a twisty, turny road towards an end game (of a kind) which you may at some point see coming... but I bet the movie turns you away from the final solution before it arrives there. There’s a fake ending on this movie where everything appears to be solved and tidied up but then... well if you’re going to watch this movie, make sure you stay right until the final scene set in the Victoria and Albert Museum is all I’m saying!

It’s a strange film as the camera work, sometimes static, sometimes on the move and often cutting between various different styles of shots really shouldn't work too well... but it so does. This film manages to sucker you in even when the combinations of shots, when you think about them after, probably shouldn’t really work together as well as they seem to.

The acting in this movie is really strong and that’s really not surprising since some great talents are at work in this one... and this coupled with some really delightful and quirky scenes makes for great entertainment. For instance, the sex-on-legs being known as actress Leonor Watling plays Frodo’s... er... I mean Elijah’s love interest in this picture... and seriously she is practically scorching in this movie. I can’t believe anyone can be this consistently sexy in scene after scene... and her introduction in a squash match where Elijah’s character has marked up the court mathematically so he knows exactly where the ball will be returning to depending on the angle it hits the wall at is both quirky and astonishingly alluring (wow... I’m getting astonished by this movie quite a lot aren’t I?). And Leonor’s introduction in this scene is like an application of deep heat to the loins in the area of arousing ones interests to a considerable acting talent (she was amazing in My Life Without Me, which by the way is another great cinematic triumph of recent cinema history) but here she just rocks!

And then we have Dominique Pinon who most people will recognise from his frequent appearances in practically all, that I can remember, of Jeunet’s movies (Delicatessan, Cty of Lost Children, Alien Resurrection, Amelie, A Very Long Engagement, Mic Macs etc) playing a bit of a warped character who may or may not be the killer (you really need to wait for that last lilttle end coda to find out the depths or lack of people’s culpability) and, as usual, he commands the few scenes he’s in.

And then you have the wonderful director Alex Cox playing a man driven completely mad by the abstraction of mathematical thought, drilling a hole in his own head and watching his body lose limb after limb to a degenerative disease... it’s really quite something to see, the little vignette where John Hurt's voice over provides us with the story of this character. And fans of Torchwood’s Owen Harper will appreciate Burn Gorman’s turn as a similarly demented Russian student who may, or may not, also be a prime suspect in the series of murders.

And then you have the musical score by Roque Baños (I finally managed to track down a CD copy from Spain in the end as it does seem to be a tricky one to get ahold of for some reason... which is a crime in itself). A prominent Spanish composer you may remember from his very Hermmanesque score for The Machinist, he further cements his reputation as being an excellent mimic (in the best sense) of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for the films of Alfred Hitchcock with a similarly stunning score which really evokes and gifts the movie with a retro, haunting atmosphere which will leave you in no doubt of the genius of this composers work... he even gets uncredited appearances as the conductor of a local Oxford orchestra at a few key places in the film.

So there you have it... an absolutely stunning ride, this one, which I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone who is into the art of cinema and has a love and passion of movies in general. You owe yourself to seek this one out... it’s really quite extraordinary.