A young woman turns her face from the deed she is about to commit; we see only a head of dark black hair where her eyes and mouth should be. The camera pans down, past her milky neck and over her subtly stunning torso, catching her hand as it plunges into a sack of grain.
The same woman, this time in the privacy of her home, grins excitedly, brandishing a spoon with which she cracks her cr_me brule, releasing oozing cream.
Next, the camera cranes from a deep green cascade, over a dam on which the woman skips stones into the tranquil St. Martin’s Canal, as the falls thunder behind her. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has made it clear that his heroine, AmZlie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), has a fascination with penetration.
If there were any doubt, he concludes AmZlie’s opening sequence with its namesake standing on a rooftop overlooking Paris, asking herself how many couples are having orgasms at that moment. With all her sneaking around Paris cracking shells, it’s only a matter of time before someone cracks hers.
AmZlie (2001), which will wrap up the SLU Global Film Series on April 24, is the story of a girl who grew up between a rock of a mother and an island of a father, and spent her days longing to move from the Paris suburbs to the big city.
We pick up her story in August 1997: She’s a waitress in a lively Paris cafZ, owns her own gorgeous apartment, makes sure to spend enough time at the cinema and in the parks, yet she is no less a loner than she was as a child.
She’s also no less a dreamer, having taken the first step of imagining what the world is really like below a fa_ade of complacency and contentment–a world oozing under its flaky surface, thundering just behind its back.
But during a chance encouter in a train station with Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), the secret man of her dreams, she realizes the joy she finds beneath the world’s surfaces is worthless if she has no one with whom to share it. Now all she has to do is tell him. The only problem is that she’s so shy she can hardly make eye contact with anyone without bowing her head in embarrassment.
Jeunet’s story is a hopeful one, though, mainly because there is a dreamy, comforting look and feel to the entire film. Influenced by the brilliantly colored paintings of Brazilian artist Juarez Machado and heavily aided by advances in digital editing, AmZlie’s cinematography is simply sublime.
Subway stations and produce markets are fused with such rich greens they look like blown glass; both AmZlie and her apartment are draped in the most stunning reds; points of digitally enhanced blue on lamps and mailboxes make this film a living oil painting. Bruno Delbonnel’s camerawork–including two nearly impossible crane shots–is masterful.
The camera –at times AmZlie’s only companion in her antics and dreams–has as vivid an imagination as AmZlie herself.
In a movie whose gods–its narrator and its lense–engage in dreams so hopefully, our heroine need only persevere and her fantasies and magic will do the rest.
Le Fabuleux destin d’ AmZlie Poulain, a.k.a. AmZlie, is the last movie in this semester’s SLU Global Film Series. It will screen free of charge on April 24 at 7 p.m. in Kelley Auditorium.
