Amelie: A Text book for Telugu film makers.

Story: It is rare to find a French film that is as positive as Amelie, the film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet whose earlier films include Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and Alien: Resurrection. Amelie is a fable set in present day Paris, a story that is so positive and colourful which makes it almost a fairy tale. All through the film what we see is beauty exaggerated.

Amelie is a whimsical tale of love, friendship, isolation and yearning. This film stars Audrey Tautou in the title role as a young woman who works as a waiter in a small Paris Café. Amelie grows up as a lonesome kid into a young woman who longs for love and care. As a child his father falsely identifies her as a child with a heart trouble and declares unsuitable for school. Adding to this Amelie loses her mother as a kid. As a young woman she finds it difficult to come out of her introvertive character.

Her life falls into a routine of adulthood until one day she discovers a rusty box with the childhood treasures of a one-time young boy from the 50s. With the discovery of the box Amelie sets out to find out the person, in the process of tracking the owner of the childhood treasure she finds the objective of her life: To make people happy and thus begins her voyage.

Amelie sets out on a journey of life with intelligent and inventive plans to straighten the lives of people around her. This film like most of the films has a parallel story, or sub plot in which Amelie plays a love game of hide and seek with a strange young man whose hobby is to collect the unwanted photos from automated photo machines and to form a collage of unsuccessful facial expressions.

Direction: This is out and out a director’s film realised with the utmost perfection. It is a rare and widely successful French film in the sense that we cannot find such overflowing goodness and beauty in most French films. In the hands of any other director this film would have turned out to be one of those ‘family films’ or ‘feel good films’. But the vision of the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet helped this film achieve a greater success all over the world.

The way Jean-Pierre Jeunet handled the character introduction and character build up should be commended for the innovative cinematic devices he used. At times the ideas might seem a bit silly but they worked perfectly for this film. But this film might not interest viewers of serious cinema and also might find repeated audience.

Even though the director succeeded in making this film beautifully green, but some body not so fond of the colour green would hate this film. The whole film is painted with saturated greens (Thanks to the Digital post production).At times the green does appear to be too much of it but as a whole Amelie is a good film to watch.

Rating: 8/10

Analysis: when I was watching this film, two things were constantly in my mind one is a Telugu film (Chakram by Krishna Vamsi) and the other is a novel (Vennello aadapilla by Yandamoori). To my surprise Amelie was like a mish mash of the film and the novel.
The film Chakram is very much similar to the theme of Amelie because in both the films the protagonists embark on a journey of self discovery by trying to solve the problems of others. But in Amelie what inspires her to be a do gooder is to find answer for her own problems, but in Chakram the protagonist discovers that he has an incurable disease and before his death he wants to help as many people as possible.

When we compare the characters of Chakram and Amelie there is a big lesson to be learnt in terms of character development. In Chakram every other character, except the protagonist seems to be in a big trouble and the way Krishna Vamsi (The director of Chakram) portrays the characters is rather silly, obvious and explicit. He chose kids, youngsters, house wives, husbands in groups and tried to portray the problems of the society in general rather than the personal problems of the characters. The film failed miserably because of his explicit categorisation of the characters and generalisation of their problems and even worse he tried to provide collective solution for the problems of the group.

These characters when compared to Amelie, even though they appear out of a fairy tale, have characters of their own. That’s the essential secret of creating good and believable characters: Characters with a character.

The novel, Vennello Aadapilla is similar to Amelie or Amelie is similar to the novel Vennello Aadapilla, because the sub plot of the film (in search of her soul mate) closely resembles the plot of the novel. In the novel a girl plays a cat and mouse game with a chess player and all through the novel she leaves clues for him to find out who she is. But the novel has a slightly sad ending but Amelie ends exactly at the time when she meets her soul mate.

To be honest many of the scenes reminded of scenes from many Telugu films and I was surprised by the way these scenes are handled so differently by the director. It is not to say that this film was hugely inspired by Telugu films, but to say that the feel good nature of this film is very close to the soul of most Indian films (that always deal with the goodness of the protagonist and his or her ways of helping others in trouble).

Conclusion:I strongly recommend this film to Krishna Vamsi and all Telugu film enthusiasts.