Amélie

A film set in Montmartre, in Paris. Amélie grew up alone. Her father thought her heart beat too fast and did not send her to school; her mother died in an accident. The adult Amélie waits tables in a café. She gets close to nobody and takes pleasure in small things. One day she finds a gap in the bathroom wall. Inside is a box a boy hid forty years earlier. She gets the box back to its owner and watches the man's reaction from a distance. From that moment she devotes her life to doing good for people in secret. From there the film is a series of small interventions. Helping a grocer's assistant, a letter to a neighbour, her father's garden gnome, and a walk described to a blind man. There is also a man. Nino collects photographs discarded at photo booths, and instead of speaking to him directly Amélie sets up a game. What the narrative is interested in is not love but contact: the film is really about someone who cannot approach another person, and all the games are ways of postponing it. The telling is fast and ornate. Narration, freeze frames, looks straight to camera, and lists of what the characters like and do not like. The colour was deliberately altered; the image was pulled toward green and red and unwanted details of the city were cleaned digitally. It took an extraordinary amount at the French box office and was nominated for five Academy Awards. Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus and Serge Merlin are in the cast. The music is by Yann Tiersen. Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes cheerful, ornate, optimistic films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the film shows Paris as a deliberately cleaned fairy tale, which was criticised on release.