Bristol Film Festival: Amelie

Bashed out as a kind of catharsis after he directed the gloomy Alien: Resurrection in Hollywood, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s immensely likeable eccentric romantic fable is cheerful and uplifting enough to snare romcom enthusiasts, while sufficiently inventive and visually dazzling to entertain all but the most curmudgeonly of cineastes. Trainspotterly types will also enjoy Jeunet’s reprisal of the rhythmic shagging gag that provided the most memorable scene in his first hit, Delicatessen.

The fast and furious pre-credits sequence is likely to leave you breathless and/or struggling to keep up with the subtitles as we’re plunged headlong into the surreal fantasy world of Amelie Poulain (luminous, wide-eyed, moon-faced Audrey Tautou). The daughter of a health inspector with a penchant for garden gnomes, and a mother who perished when a suicidal Canadian tourist plunged on top of her from the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral when Amelie was six, our heroine’s childhood was deprived of love. Not only that, but her only physical contact with her father caused her heart to race so much that he diagnosed a cardiac abnormality, forcing her to live as an invalid. Now a shy adult residing in a curiously stylised Montmartre just after the death of the Princess of Wales, café waitress Amelie revels in simple sensual pleasures and finds herself drawn to the local oddballs. These include housebound ‘glass man’ Raymond who copies Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party over and over again, and the sensitive local greengrocer’s son whose tyrannical father bullies him for finding beauty in the fruit’n’veg. After chancing upon an old tin box containing a schoolboy’s memories and returning it to the now middle-aged owner, Amelie realises that her vocation is to fix the holes in other people’s lives. But her own life is about to become more complicated when she finds an unusual photographic album belonging to Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), a sex shop checkout worker who moonlights as a fairground ghoul, and promptly falls in love.

Warm, funny and endlessly inventive without ever becoming forced or self-consciously wacky, Amelie benefits from a superb performance by Tautou, who proves as adept at physical comedy as emotionally engaging cheeky innocence. The ways in which she takes revenge on the greengrocer by fucking with his head are particularly inspired. If you want to be picky, you could argue that the film loses a certain amount of momentum after that astonishing opening sequence, but Jeunet fills it with so much visual and narrative funny business that the chances are you’ll hardly notice.

This suitably romantic Bristol Film Festival screening in Averys’ historic wine cellar includes tastings of four French wines. Note that this event is open to over-18s only. Go here for tickets and further information.