25 years of ‘Amélie’: the movie that changed my life

25 years on, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie ‘Amélie’ is still just as fresh and enjoyable as it was in 2001, led by a brilliant performance from Audrey Tautou.

Source: 25 years of ‘Amélie’: the movie that changed my life

This April, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie turns 25, and in a few months’ time, so do I, becoming the same age as one of my most beloved films, and just a year or two older than the protagonist, who was played so charmingly by Audrey Tautou.

I’ve long felt a deep connection to the film, although that’s hardly a unique experience, as millions of people love Amélie, and it’s perhaps one of the most famous French movies ever made, rivalling French New Wave classics like Breathless when the question ‘name a French film’ is asked. You don’t have to be into foreign or arthouse cinema to have seen the 2001 film, and for many, it’s a gateway; it certainly was for me.

But while we often discard these gateway films in favour of weirder, more obscure ones as we delve into a specific niche, I could never forget how perfect Amélie is, and while some might see it as a little saccharine, I would simply argue against that conception. Sure, it has its moments, but the film is aware of these, and it asks us to lean into the whimsy, to appreciate the more wholesome parts of life.

You can take it from me, as I’m not one to enjoy a saccharine movie and much rather watch something a bit depressing, to be honest, but Amélie Poulain just steals my heart every time, and makes me wish I worked in a Parisian café, distracting myself from my own world by getting stuck into the lives of others, while buoyed by perhaps the most French-sounding score of all-time courtesy of Yann Tiersen.

Amélie is illuminated in a warm and nostalgic palette of reds, greens and yellows, making me yearn for my world to actually look as vibrant and fantastical as that, even when everything is a little too green, and I love that there are little moments of magic that colour the everyday, like when the titular character lies in bed, and the lamp by her side momentarily comes to life, the ceramic pig attached to the stand pulling the cord and turning out the light.

I love her desire to help others and to see the best in people, although she never gets too good for a bit of playful revenge, like when she sabotages Collignon’s routine because of his treatment of the mentally-disabled Lucien, and I definitely enjoy her strange friendship with the glass man, Raymond, who carefully paints reproductions of Luncheon of the Boating Party and soon unlocks the key to Amélie’s desire for romance with a young man named Nino.

What I love most, though, is how romance plays a central role in the film without being its sole defining factor, as regardless of the fact that Amélie is pretty lonely, when she realises that she fancies Nino, she enacts a cat-and-mouse game with him, all the while playing matchmaker for others and meddling in their lives for the sake of helping people for the better.

Her interest in Nino is playful and ultimately rewarding because she finds her match in a man who is similarly a little odd, his quirk being collecting disused photobooth strips and compiling them into a photo album, while Amélie has a whole host of peculiarities which the film so adoringly celebrates, like hearing the cracking of a crème brûlée, with the montage of her favourite little moments, and those of her friends and family, never failing to elicit a smile.

The film highlights those intense moments of fancying someone, with Amélie’s heart literally thumping out of her chest at one point when she sees Nino, and while she gets her happy ending with him, the film doesn’t ever make this romance its only conceit, which remains focused on the tale of a dreaming introvert who finds her own ways of communicating and connecting with others, of imagining the world around her, like when she observes others in the cinema with a smile or contemplates how many people are having sex across Paris in that very moment, and never before had I seen a film with a character quite like her.

Watching Amélie as a teenager for the first time was a turning point, giving me someone I could relate to, who was quiet but never subservient, who found happiness in her own determined and fun way. And what’s more, it opened me up to a world of cinema I didn’t quite know existed; I’d certainly seen a few foreign films before, but this one was so vibrant, so artistically-driven without sacrificing plot or character development, that it was witty and stylish, and an utterly addictive gateway.

I fell in love with the movie and subsequently immersed myself in the kinds of cinema that further depicted a world so real yet larger-than-life, with Amélie becoming the cinematic embodiment of possibility and pure magic to me, and years later, that magic is still there, flickering through every frame.

Cardinals McElroy and Cupich denounce Iran war: ‘War now has become a spectator sport.’

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening,” Cardinal Blase Cupich said.

 

by Edward Desciak

Following the United States and Israel’s overnight missile barrage of Iran on Feb. 28 and the widening war across the Middle East, a number of U.S. bishops have spoken out in opposition to the war.

They underscored an urgent need for peace and a return to diplomacy, denounced as unjust American and Israeli military aggression and expressed deep concern for the millions in the region affected by the armed conflict.

“At this present moment, the U.S. decision to go to war against Iran fails to meet the just war threshold for a morally legitimate war,” Cardinal Robert McElroy of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., said.

In an interview with the Catholic Standard on March 9, he explained that the U.S. offensive operations failed to meet at least three criteria of just war theory—the Catholic framework for evaluating the morality of military action—including the requirements for just cause, right intention and clarity that “the benefits of this war will outweigh the harm which will be done,” made impossible by the unpredictability of the region.

Cardinal McElroy said: “Almost everyone rightly believes that the Khamenei regime has been for decades a brutal and repressive government that has spread terrorism throughout the world and should be replaced. But there is immense concern that this war will spiral out of control and embroil the United States in ever greater depth.”

The cardinal, who has also voiced opposition to the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy, mentioned particular concern for the military families he has spoken with who are worried about their loved ones’ safety.

“We must all work together to forbid this expansionism to lead us into an ongoing morass in Iran,” he said, expressing his “deepest concern” for the “deterioration of moral norms” in the United States and the world, signified by the growing willingness to turn to preventative war over diplomacy as a legitimate means of foreign policy.

Cardinal McElroy’s responses echoed comments from Cardinal Blase Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago, who criticized the war and the Trump administration’s mix of militarism and entertainment in a statement on March 7.

Cardinal Cupich cited a post from the official White House X account captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” that spliced clips from popular action movies, cartoons and TV shows “with actual strike footage from their war on Iran.”

It was one of many edits the White House has posted over the last few days in which the account has similarly spliced together video footage of the war with NFL and MLB highlights and video game references.

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening,” Cardinal Cupich said. “This horrifying portrayal demonstrates that we now live in an era when the distance between the battlefield and the living room has been drastically reduced.”

He noted that the social media post dishonored the six U.S. soldiers who had been killed at that point during the war (the death of another service member was confirmed on March 8) as well as the hundreds of others who have died across the Middle East, “including the scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school” the day a U.S. missile struck a naval base next to an elementary school in Iran, killing 175 people.

“The moral crisis we are facing is not just a matter of the war itself, but also how we, the observers, view violence, for war now has become a spectator sport or strategy game,” Cardinal Cupich wrote, referencing a particularly macabre scandal involving the popular prediction market site Kalshi, where Americans can now gamble on matters of life and death. The company is the respondent in a $54 million class action lawsuit after it declined to pay out wagers on whether Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be ousted by March 1, citing a “death carveout.”

Cardinal Cupich also urged the American people not to “become addicted to the ‘spectacle’ of explosions.”

“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment,” he wrote, “as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store.”

“I know that the American people are better than this. We have the good sense to know that what is happening is not entertainment but war, and that Iran is a nation of people, not a video game others play to entertain us,” he concluded.

The cardinals joined the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul Coakley, who followed Pope Leo XIV’s lead and released a statement on March 1 condemning the hostilities: “We ask for a halt to the spiral of violence, and a return to multilateral diplomatic engagement that seeks to uphold the ‘well-being of peoples, who yearn for peaceful existence founded on justice.’”

Archbishop Coakley added: “I invite Catholics and all people of goodwill to continue our ardent prayers for peace in the Middle East, for the safety of our troops and the innocent, that leaders may seek dialogue over destruction, and pursue the common good over the tragedy of war.”

The Archdiocese of New York’s new archbishop, Ronald Hicks, also commented on the Iran crisis in a brief interview for 1010 WINS on March 5, calling for prayers and diplomacy. “We have to give some special prayers for our men and women in uniform and pray for their protection, too, and everyone involved,” he said.

“It is absolutely heartbreaking.”

Source: Cardinals McElroy and Cupich denounce Iran war: ‘War now has become a spectator sport.’ – America Magazine

Film review: Moi qui t’aimais explores troubled passion between star couple Signoret and Montand

Diane Kurys’s gossipy, subtly performed biopic portrays the last years of a legendary relationship rife with destructive compulsions

By Adrian Mack

FOR FANS OF SUMPTUOUS emotional masochism, this film from veteran filmmaker Diane Kurys whistles through the final 12 years of Simone Signoret’s marriage to Yves Montand, until her death in 1985.

The relationship was legendary, like a French Burton and Taylor, but Montand was also a legendary cheat, and his affair with Marilyn Monroe is never far from the surface. In fact it bookends everything, with Signoret’s public fortitude over the matter finally giving way to the private perspective, voiced as death looms.

It’s the mystery at the heart of Moi qui t’aimais. Why did she stay with Montand? The clue is in the title—duh—and it would take a more serious two-hour effort to make something profound of a story that’s only really distinguished by its extraordinary characters. We’re left with a solid biopic that’s just as gossipy and salacious as the viewer wants it to be, albeit with an aptly subtle performance from Marina Foïs as a brilliant woman whose physical decline, aided by drink and other compulsions, was swift and also very public. Signoret turned that to her advantage with 1977’s Madame Rosa, something of a comeback and a show of strength for a once great beauty, and Kurys’s film naturally dwells on that triumph, while Montand pours ever more effort and fuss into maintaining his stardom—and his physique.

“He’s terrified of aging” is the film’s grand conclusion, so again: don’t come looking for depth. Moi qui t’aimais also has some fun with the couple’s wavering and maybe fashionable politics, and makes a running joke of his wealthy brand of socialisme. The always watchable Roschdy Zem matches his partner’s performance and he has a charisma of his own without really embodying Montand. But then, who possibly could?

Source: Film review: Moi qui t’aimais explores troubled passion between star couple Signoret and Montand — Stir