Determined to publicly take on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie’s creator, he vented his outrage in an op-ed published in Libération entitled “ Amélie pas jolie” (“ Amélie is not pretty”).
When three inner-city youths appeared in the train station scene, I made the mistake of whispering to Kaganski: “Here come the film’s representatives of Otherness!” Whether or not my sarcastic comment influenced him, Kaganski left the film enraged, declaring his disgust with this demagogic retro postcard version of France, undeniably cleansed of all cultural diversity and, by extension, all immigrants.
#Amelie may professional#
We had missed the press screenings and hadn’t said a word about it in the magazine, as much due to crass professional incompetence as total indifference to the film’s box-office success.Īfter seeing films by Rivette, Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, Nobuhiro Suwa, Jean-Marie Straub and Claude Lanzmann, the sweet Amélie seemed rather insipid, a little boring, and, above all, too French to be true.
#Amelie may tv#
Then, to make matters worse, the film’s lead actor, Mathieu Kassovitz, who was on the Cannes jury, announced with his customary tact that if it had been up to him, not only would the film have been in competition at Cannes, it would also have taken home the Palme d’Or! In May, as the paradise for artists and intellectuals that is Cannes unfolded in its auteurist ghetto and as France belatedly discovered the subtleties of reality TV with the broadcast of Loft Story (France’s equivalent to Big Brother), the country only had eyes for Amélie.Ī Boquet of Grief and Sex By Phillip Lopateīack from Cannes, exhausted but pleased with the high standard of the festival’s lineup, I convinced my Inrockuptibles colleague Serge Kaganski to go with me to see Amélie, at a regular theater with a regular audience. All of which led to one big question, which quickly flared into a controversy: why wasn’t Amélie representing France at the Cannes Film Festival? Extremely embarrassed by the scale of the phenomenon, the Festival directors let it be known through a press leak that the selection committee had seen only a workprint without music, and thus were unable to appreciate the film’s true worth. When Amélie was released in late April of this year, even serious newspapers like Libération and Le Monde discreetly took part in the general euphoria. Our film industry is breathing a collective sigh of relief: we’ve got a hit! The miracle began with the first press screenings: everyone loved it, and even the most hardened critics applauded enthusiastically as they wept for joy. Right from the start Le Fabuleux destin d’ Amélie Poulain, or Amélie as it's now called in the U.S., was a runaway hit in France-the film has managed to sell seven and a half million tickets, which translates into roughly $40 million at the box office, a sum rarely achieved by French films at home. By Frédéric Bonnaud in the November-December 2001 Issue
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