My Cultural Diet

There was a period of time in the early ’00s when Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie was in my top 10 favorite films of all time. Watching it again for the first time in 15 – 20 years, I can still understand why that was the case. Amélie is almost impossibly whimsical, thanks to a star-making performance by Audrey Tautou as the titular character, a consummate dreamer who starts meddling in other people’s lives, with mixed results. But her various machinations may end up ruining her own chance at love. (As for whether or not I had a crush on Ms. Tautou back then, what do you think?) And then there’s the film’s dreamy look, which presents Paris as a sort of postcard come to life where delightful wonders and mysteries lurk around every corner. Here in 2025, Amélie does get a bit cloying at times, but its charms remain largely intact, and I appreciate the film’s insistence on enjoying life’s seemingly trivial and mundane pleasures. What’s more, I actually got a wee bit emotional remembering just how deeply it affected me when I first saw it, and was going through a bit of a romantic crisis of my own.

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