Amelie – Bitch Flicks

The Sacred Heart of ‘Amélie’

Whether or not it was the intent of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie can be seen as the female representation of a Christ figure in a modern tragedy. … Amélie’s love, like that of Christ, is selfless and knows no boundaries. … Amélie is altruistic and doesn’t hesitate to help other people.

This guest post is written by Giselle Defares.

The idea of love, chance and destiny – the cause and effect relationship – are themes that frequently occur in our cinematic history. For most of us, love is the strongest emotion that we know, an emotion that can entail powerful forces. In Amélie, love and happiness are hidden in the mundane things of life. Or in the case of Amélie, it’s putting the tip of her spoon on the caramelized layer of sugar on her crème brûlée.

“To ask one of these kinds of newspapers in Paris to love Amélie is like asking the Pope to put on a condom. They hate these kinds of movies.” This quote from the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, reflects the controversy, at that time, surrounding Amélie. This extravagant romantic film was loved around the world except within the French film establishment. The interview took place in May 2001 and it appears Jeunet’s comments possessed a kernel of truth because the Cannes Film Festival refused to put Amélie in the official selection.

The self-taught director Jeunet is known for his astonishing visuals – see also his specific mise-en-scène, heavy use of color, CGI and voice-over narration. He took a light-hearted approach with Amélie instead of the inaccessible and often gloomy atmosphere of his earlier films such as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. It starts with the opening scene where you’re bombarded with trivia and funny facts. Jeunet’s style is reminiscent of the prologue of Paul T. Anderson’s Magnolia or Tom Twykers’ Run Lola Run. Amélie became a worldwide box office success and also earned five Oscar nominations.

Amélie centers around Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), a sensitive young woman, who after the death of her mother has withdrawn into her own fragile world, where the smallest pleasures of life are her priority. She works as a waitress in a corner bistro, until the day that Princess Diana dies in a car crash and everything changes. The shock of the news causes Amélie to drop a bottle cap, which unlocks a stone in the wall of her apartment, which leads her to discover a very old box in which a young boy used to hoard his treasures. Amélie tracks the boy – now an older man – down, and in returning his old, rusty box, Amélie finds her reason to live. She will make people happy in extraordinary ways.

Most of the scenes are shown in chronological order but there are several smaller storylines and flashbacks interwoven. Jeunet has an interesting way of playing with dialogue in the film. Amélie often loses the ability to properly communicate in important moments. The overarching role of the omniscient narrator — the key link between various scenes and sequences — becomes more important. The narrator continuously informs the viewer of Amélie’s personal thoughts and feelings.

Whether or not it was the intent of Jeunet, Amélie can be seen as the female representation of a Christ figure in a modern tragedy. In Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films, Adele Reinhartz gives two basic criteria that a movie character must meet in order to be seen as a Christ figure:

“That there be some direct and specific resemblance to Christ (though a full replication in every detail is not essential); and that the fundamental message associated with the possible Christ-figure has to be consistent with the life and work of Christ, and not contrary to his message about liberation and love.”

Amélie’s love, like that of Christ, is selfless and knows no boundaries. A representation of this point can be seen when she appears in several scenes in a Zorro costume. She disguises herself in order to help the people in her community. This is evident when she intervenes in the bullying of Lucien, who is monoplegic, as well as helping a blind man crossing the street. In that sense, Amélie is altruistic and doesn’t hesitate to help other people.

Several religious references occur in the dialogue. Dominique Bretodeau, the man who’s reunited with his rusty box of childhood treasures, calls Amélie an “angel” and states that she must be his “guardian angel.” Throughout the film, Amélie’s actions are referred to as a miracle. It’s important to note that her actions often leave the person confused as if an “outside or divine force” has intervened in their lives.

The turning point in the film is the sequence where Amélie views a memorial broadcast of her own death on television where she’s shown as a nun, washing the feet of the blind man, next to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. This is similar to the moment that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples – an act of love and humility. The narrator later calls her in that moment the “Madonna of the unloved.”

The memorial scene functions as a symbolic death, since Amélie is still alive afterwards. She was afraid that her life had no more meaning after she accomplished everything she wanted. The narrator then states, “As she went, she felt a stab of regret for letting her father die without trying to give his stifled life the breath of air she had given to so many others.” Thus, she’s revived again knowing that her task is far from fulfilled, and that others closest to her, such as her father, require help as well. This leads to the moment where Amélie visits her father’s house and takes his garden gnome, who she uses for her good deed towards him.

Aforementioned, color plays an important role in the visual style of Jeunet and that’s certainly noticeable throughout the film. Jeunet manipulated and used various grading of color. The saturated color palette of the film – red, green and yellow are dominant – reflects the happy feelings of Amélie. Often colors clash when Jeunet chose sepia tones and black and white, which signals intrusion in the lives of the characters. The use of CGI is most noticeable when it comes to Amélie’s imagination – see the visualization of her loneliness via an animated crocodile or Amélie’s “sacred heart.”

In Jeunet’s portrayal of Amélie’s “sacred heart,” a clear parallel exists with Christian iconography. The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is a Catholic icon which represents the love of Jesus Christ. It’s often portrayed as a human heart surrounded by flames. Amélie’s heart is displayed in a bright yellow and orange glow which clearly draws on the connotation of the sacred heart of Jesus Christ. The cinematography in this particular scene is interesting since Jeunet breaks a shot – a reverse shot between Amélie and her crush, in order to show the heart of Amélie but resumes afterwards. Thus his cinematography breaks with what you would expect and leads the viewer’s gaze towards the heart.

Tautou is phenomenal in her role as Amélie and she deservedly received several award nominations (including a BAFTA Award and César Award) for her portrayal. She truly carries the film and has great chemistry with all the other characters. Admittedly, the storyline is quite thin and some characters feel like cardboard cutouts, but Tautou saves the film with her doe-eyed likeableness.

Initially it seems that Amélie is content in her role as anonymous benefactor, whilst secretly crushing on the shy Nino – who collects photos from automated photo booths people don’t want; as you do. Until, an old neighbor tells her: “You don’t have bones of glass. You can take life’s knocks. If you let this chance pass, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton.” The call to embrace life to its fullest is original, playful and engagingly filmed by Jeunet. A charming film with lots of heart, even the most stoic viewer would succumb to the magic of Amélie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrlQR_KH_nw

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law) and American pop culture. See her blog here http://zilvertong.tumblr.com/ or follow her on twitter at @zilvertong.

Where is the Female Version of ‘Whiplash’?

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Two weeks ago, I made a special trip downtown to see Whiplash, a movie that is every bit as good as its rave reviews have promised. Whiplash is tense and thoughtful, with skilful pacing and a stunning conclusion, and it asks challenging questions about the human experience. What is achievement? What drives us? What is the value of love and approval?

I absolutely recommend it – but that’s not what I want to talk about, here.

Aside from having an awesome, introspective story that deals in universal human themes, Whiplash has one other prominent feature – 99.9 percent of it is dudes.

The music student and music teacher at the core of the story are dudes, the other people in their band are all dudes, the main supporting character – who is the music student’s father – is a dude. Melissa Benoist is there for about seven minutes, cumulatively, and then the rest of the movie is about men grappling with big, important questions.

There’s nothing wrong with that – and, in popular cinema, there’s also nothing unusual about that – but it did make me wonder: why can’t we have more introspective movies about the human experience where the humans experiencing things are women?

Like, speaking as a woman, I am just as interested in big, existential, philosophical, and psychological questions as men are. I spend just as much time trying to figure them out, and they have just as much relevance to my life – but you wouldn’t really guess that from going to the movies.

Most of the time, when you watch a movie about how A Person should deal with X, the person is a man. To the point that it really stands out, when it’s not.

Gravity, for instance, aside from being a feast for your 3D glasses, is a story about how A Person should deal with loss. And it’s striking because the person is played by Sandra Bullock, and she’s on screen alone for most of the movie, grappling with universal human challenges like how to process grief, and how to find the will to live after experiencing trauma.

A lot of critics have argued that the film would have been better if it had just been about trying to fix a space shuttle without getting blown up, without making it a metaphor for how Sandra Bullock overcomes the loss of her child. It’s the loss and grief story, though, that takes this from being an action movie with a female protagonist – which is rare enough – to being an introspective movie about the human experience with a female protagonist – a genre that might be the rarest of all.

Depending which types of movies you’re analyzing, only 15 to 23 percent of top-grossing films have a female protagonist, despite the fact that women make up half the population. I’m willing to bet that, if we could easily cordon off and analyze the percentage of female protagonists in introspective movies about the human experience, the numbers would be even lower.

You’ve got your female action heroes, and you’ve got your female romantic leads – you’ve even got your female gross-out and/or buddy comedies, now. Occasionally, you even get your female everyman in the shape of Anna Kendrick. But, finding a woman as the stand-in for humanity is like finding a unicorn in a world where horses are already almost extinct.

If you look at this survey of Hollywood movies that came out in 2012, none of the ones with a female lead – except Brave, which is specifically about how there’s more than one acceptable way to be female – seem to be concerned with especially deep questions. This is the same year that brought us Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Looper, and ParaNorman – male-led stories with varying levels of introspection that focus on questions of history and human connection, belief, our capacity to learn to care for others, and compassion in the face of fear. Female-led movies in the survey include a couple of horror movies, an instalment in the Twilight franchise, The Hunger Games (which was good, but not that deep), and whatever the hell Snow White and the Huntsman was supposed to be.

Casually searching the internet for lists of existential movies, or movies about what it means to be human also returns a lot of movies about dudes.

That’s not to say that there aren’t deep, introspective movies with female protagonists. It’s just that they’re few and far between.

Slogging through Melancholia is about as fun as slogging through real depression, but it’s an introspective movie about a person who’s grappling with Big Questions concerning depressive realism, and whether pessimism is just good sense. Similarly, Black Swan is (arguably) a movie about a person grappling with identity, and how we reconcile with our shadow selves.

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain – or, Amélie – is an introspective story about a person who struggles with shyness and how to take risks. And, it works at least as well as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is about exactly the same thing, only starring a male protagonist.

So, there are some introspective films about the human experience that feature a female protagonist. But, why do these stories so often default to male?

The first explanation would be that most of the writers, directors, and producers working on movies are men, and therefore they’re more likely to create a male protagonist, because that’s the experience and perspective they’re most familiar and comfortable with.

Fair enough.

Though I hasten to add that Gravity, Melancholia, and Amélie were all written and directed by men, I think it’s valid for a story-teller to gravitate to telling stories about characters of their own gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In some cases, it can even seem arrogant for story-tellers to presume to speak for people with different life experiences. That’s why it’s important to make room for stories told by people who’ve been underrepresented in media. You know, instead of making it as hard as possible for those people to get in on the action.

The second explanation also goes a long way toward answering the question, “Why does this even matter, Katherine?” and concerns the way that media presents “male” as standard and “female” as a special variation on “male.”

This is feminist criticism 101 and I won’t get into a long discussion of it, but everyone reading this blog understands that we live in a culture where “person” defaults to male a hell of a lot more often than it defaults to female – where being a woman is a marked status that denotes something other than a normal/average/neutral individual. Men and women are so used to seeing men as the default human that it can create a self-perpetuating cycle where writers keep reaching for “a man” when they mean to say “a person,” and the constant presentation of “a person” as “a man” on screen just reinforces that bias.

True story: I’m a woman, and I write things, and unless I specifically stop myself and take stock of what I’m doing, I default to male characters when I just need some random person. This is a thing that happens without malice or even intent, which is why it’s important to bring the pattern to conscious awareness.

Introspective human experience movies are typically more about A Person than they are about an individual with really specific characteristics; there’s a good chance that men are the default just because nobody’s thinking about it that much.

The third explanation, and the one that bums me out the most, is that there may be a perception that women either aren’t interested in or aren’t as capable of answering philosophical questions – something that’s also suggested by the unfortunate pattern where male actors are asked deep questions about the issues raised by their movies, and female actors are asked about their bodies and clothes.

Happily, the solution is the same no matter what the explanation is: we need to balance things out by creating more movies like Gravity, and Melancholia, and Amélie, where the stories are about people grappling with problems that people must face, and the people in question are women.

Just like it’s right that Matthew McConaughey should be able to star in a movie that’s specifically about masculinity (Mud), and a movie that’s about the abstract question of human selflessness (Interstellar), female actors should be able to take the lead in movies that are specifically about women as well as movies that are about people in general – because they represent both of those things.

So, where is the female version of Whiplash? It’s 50 years forward in time, when “person” has an equal chance of meaning “woman.”

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Gender & Food Week: A Woman’s Place in the Kitchen: The Cinematic Tradition of Cooking to Catch a Man

Meryl Streep and Steve Martin in It’s Complicated

This guest post is written by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

Early in the 1954 film Sabrina — the original, starring Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart — the titular ingenue finds herself at a cooking school in Paris. Sent over as a gift from her father’s employer, the wealthy Larabee family, Sabrina continues to nurse her crush on the younger Larabee son, David (William Holden), even from Paris, and it shows in her cooking. The head chef inspects her souffle, and declares it “Much too low.” “I don’t know what happened,” she moans pitifully to herself. “I know what happened,” her colleague, a much older French gentleman, says, “You forgot to turn on the oven.” She cries out, and he guesses that she is in love—unhappily in love. “A woman happily in love, she burns the souffle. A woman unhappily in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.”

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina

As centuries of unequal domestic duties have shown us, women who are happy in the kitchen must, by extension, be happy in love. Having fallen in love with the 1995 version of Sabrina long before seeing the original, I had assumed that Sabrina’s (Julia Ormond) maturity and allure upon returning from Paris were indebted to a haircut, long walks by the Seine, and a new passion for photography — not a new talent at whipping up souffles in perfect capris and ballet flats. The ascription of her romantic desirability to her talent with food is an uncomfortable, backward narrative, one that’s hard to escape from even in modern cinema.Young women have heard throughout time that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and film and television have done an excellent job of backing up this assumption. Not all women who can cook were taught to do so at the behest of future matchmakers, but the prevailing attitude, taught to us in women’s magazines and through the constant refrain of mainstream narratives, is that if you catch a man, you’d better make a decent meal. The loathsome popularity of dishes such as “engagement chicken” carry with them the promise that women need only master the kitchen to hook a man. DIY domesticity, maybe, or just cooking to couple up, but either way, it’s an uncomfortably old-fashioned message.

Cooking has always been a creative act, no matter who’s doing the dishes — it requires careful thought, imagination, and precision. It is, in short, one of the most skilled professions that anyone can take on, and also one of the most generous professions, because it requires thinking deeply about another person’s needs and desires. However, when a woman cooks for a man, and in doing so wins his heart, the woman appears conventionally domestic and feminine — traditional in her skill sets, understanding of her appropriate role in the house and in the relationship, and so subservient to the man’s needs. When a woman cooks on film, even when she cooks something extraordinary, there’s something profoundly submissive when she does it to please a man.

Ruth Younger (Ruby Dee) and Walter (Sidney Poitier) in A Raisin in the Sun

In the very beginning of the 1961 film A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth Younger (Ruby Dee) is trying to stir her husband Walter (Sidney Poitier) to start his day — he wants to talk about his dreams, his ambition, and she keeps reminding him to eat his breakfast. He lambasts her for her intolerance, but her means of affecting change — and her means of keeping the family together — have been limited to the kitchen.

Like Water for Chocolate

But cooking for a man, as shown on film, isn’t without its rewards — for good food is one of the best (and cheapest) means of seduction. When someone takes you into their kitchen, hands you a glass of wine, and promises you a delicious meal, it’s a method of flirtation that’s hard to resist. The pairing of womanly passion and culinary skills has been present as long as women’s emotions were captured in fiction: because a woman’s place has been primarily in the kitchen, her expression of whatever feelings or agency she may have comes by way of what she cooks. Look at the way Tita expresses her passion in Like Water for Chocolate, her emotions dripping into the food and infusing each bite with lust, sorrow, and joy. Her desires, forbidden by her family, cannot help but find their way into her cooking.(When this is later adapted into the romantic comedy Simply Irresistible, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s restaurant chef is accused of being a witch, manipulating her love object with the delicious meals she prepares. Just as women would be kept out of the boardroom for fear of their emotions, so too is she kept from running her own kitchen.)

This impulse, to cook to incite pleasure and admiration, even surfaces in more modern films when women would be seemingly more self-sufficient. As recently as 2011’s It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep’s pastry chef gets to be the object of two men’s lusts, in part, in no small part because she’s a spectacular cook. The scene of her late-night date with a new love interest (Steve Martin), where she makes him chocolate croissants from scratch, shows her at her most ebullient (and sexiest) throughout the film. And it’s only a few scenes later that her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) tells his kids that their mother is the “best cook in the world.” Her talent equals her desirability, displayed in her gift to create a warm, indulgent space for the men in her life.

These scenes aren’t so disquieting on their own—after all, who wouldn’t want to be served a meal infused with lust, or have Meryl Streep bake you croissants at 2am? But the inverted message also comes that, when a woman lacks warmth or compassion, it shows in her cooking.

In Clueless, as Cher (Alicia Silverstone) prepares for a date, her voiceover tells us that “When a boy is coming over, you should always have something baking.” The punchline is then seeing her unwrap an entire roll of frozen cookie dough and dropping it onto a baking sheet. (No surprise later that the entire roll burns to a crisp. “Aw, honey, you baked,” her date condescends. “I tried,” she whimpers.)

The heroine in Mostly Martha, the spectacular 2001 German film, is a good cook, the head chef of a great restaurant, but her cooking doesn’t translate when she has to take care of her niece, Lina. It takes a more genial Italian sous-chef (and Martha’s future love interest) to get the child to eat, and instead of a sophisticated dish, it’s a simple plate of spaghetti that does the trick.

Where Martha’s ambition is rewarded in the restaurant world, it’s punished when she has to act as a surrogate mother (and potential girlfriend). Only once she’s later softened in the film does her cooking — and her parenting — relax to the point of acceptance. But in reality, women don’t just cook for themselves — most of the time, the act of cooking is done as an expression of survival, rather than seduction. Preparing a meal is one indication that a person is fully self-sufficient. It’s a biased opinion, I know, but I raise an eyebrow at anyone, male or female, who tells me that they don’t ever cook for themselves. While making boeuf bourguignon or baking a seven-layer cake takes a greater level of culinary ambition, preparing a series of simple, satisfying dishes show the difference between someone who can take care of themselves, and someone who requires a babysitter.

Amelie (Audrey Tautou) in Amelie

The brief scene in Amelie of the heroine preparing her dinner shows us what adulthood looks like — even when adulthood also comes with skipping stones and playing pranks on the local butcher. And no model proves more inspiring than Janette deSautel, the female chef from HBO’s Treme, whose narrative about her New Orleans’s restaurant is entirely without romantic motivation. Even when her restaurant crumbles due to the post-Katrina economy, she rebuilds her reputation in the hard-scrabble New York restaurant scene. By bringing her New Orleans roots to bear in standout dishes at David Chang’s fictionalized restaurant Lucky Peach, she reestablishes herself as a chef to watch — and finds a new avenue toward her culinary career back in her hometown.

Chef Janette deSautel (Kim Dickens) in Treme

Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and Eric Powell (Chris Messina) in Julie & Julia

And finally, there is Julie & Julia, the story of a modern-day woman (Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams) finding inspiration in Julie Child (Meryl Streep, yet again), and using cooking to dig herself out of her personal and professional ennui. Cooking in this story threatens to tear Julie’s marriage apart — not for her lack of skill, but her preoccupation with what the cooking might mean. Her husband (Chris Messina) doesn’t mind being fed, but he does mind her obsession with letting her cooking skill transform her life. When redemption comes, you know it’s arrived when her husband gives in, asking with a smile “What’s for dinner?” Food becomes a means of personal empowerment, rather than seduction…even if it’s ultimately the husband being fed. And, at least in Julie & Julia, it puts the husband in the role of the sous chef, the kitchen support system, even when the cook is melting down over her lack of trussing ability.

So we’re getting a lot of mixed messages here — can a woman ever cook on film without it looking old-fashioned? Will preparing a meal ever been completely self-satisfying, for the benefit of the chef rather than the diner? Or, like an apron, will the function of cooking on film be forever tied to an expression of gender norms and traditional divisions of domestic labor? I don’t know if we can ever really have much of a distance from Sabrina’s souffle, for depictions of cooking will almost always be expressions of generosity, love, and compassion, no matter who holds the whisk. But for now, I’m hoping for more characters like Janette and Julie, cooking for their own satisfaction and survival rather than someone else’s. That, at least, is a dish that can be served any time of the year.

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.