Category: Movies

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.

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

Listen to The French Connection ::  December 28, 2025

Bardot

DECEMBER 28, 2025 SALUT!

  • Boris Vian “J’Suis Snob”

REST IN PEACE, B.B.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience … the best of me, to animals.”

  • Brigitte Bardot “La Madrague” (1963)
  • Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg “Bonnie & Clyde” (Serge Gainsbourg) (1967)

POST-WAR CHANSON
Smoky cafés, cobblestone streets, and a deep longing for a pre-war idealized Paris

  • Léo Ferré “Noël” (1961)
  • Catherine Sauvage “Avec Le Temps”
  • Léo Ferré “Le Vampire” (Baudelaire)
  • Barbara “Göttingen” (Monique Andrée Serf)
  • Barbara “Les Voyages” (Monique Andrée Serf)
  • Barbara “Ne Me quitte Pas (Jacques Brel)
  • Jacques Brel “Quand on n’a que l’amour” (Brel)
  • George Brassens “La Prière” (Francis Jammes / Brassens)
  • George Brassens “Le Piere Noël et le Petit Fille” (Brassens)
  • Catherine Sauvage “Black Trombone” (Serge Gainsbourg)
  • Léo Ferré “Saint Germaine des Pres” (Ferré)

Source: The French Connection :: Playlist and replay – WRIU 90.3 FM

French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died : NPR

Legendary screen siren and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died at age 91. The alluring former model starred in numerous movies, often playing the highly sexualized love interest.

By Elizabeth Blair

Brigitte Bardot, the international sex goddess of cinema in the 1950s and ’60s, has died aged 91. Bardot’s animal rights foundation announced her death in a statement to news agency Agence France-Presse on Sunday, without specifying the time or place of death.

Stylish and seductive, Bardot exuded a kind of free sexuality, rare in the buttoned-up 1950s. She modeled, made movies, influenced fashion around the world and recorded albums. She married four times. Her list of lovers famously included Warren Beatty, Nino Ferrer and singer-songwriter-producer Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she recorded the French hit Bonnie and Clyde.

As an actor, Bardot worked with some of France’s leading directors including Henri-Georges Clouzot in La Vérité (The Truth), Jean-Luc Godard in Le Mépris (Contempt) and Louis Malle in Viva Maria!

Born Catholic to an upper-middle-class couple in Paris in 1934, Bardot studied ballet and modeled before becoming an actor. As a teenager, she appeared several times on the cover of Elle magazine, attracting the attention of Roger Vadim who was six years her senior. The two married in 1952. Bardot’s parents made them wait until she turned 18.

Vadim, an aspiring director, has been credited with turning Bardot into the iconic sex symbol she became. In his 1957 film And God Created Woman, Bardot plays a provocative young woman on a quest for sexual liberation.

Vadim wanted Bardot’s appearances in his films to shake off sexual taboos. He once said that he wanted to “kill the myth, this odd rule in Christian morality, that sex must be coupled with guilt.”

Source: French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died : NPR

Movie review: ‘Young Mothers’ by Dardenne Brothers

In Young Mothers, we have four teenagers navigating their motherhood while dealing with addiction, love, unstable parents and absent partners

By Anuradha Vellat

No process tests the spirit like motherhood does. A body in continuous transition for nine months for humans. Even the non-mothers know that growing a fetus inside takes a toll and might even change the body’s anatomy for good. Add to this the cocktail of adolescence and you have an impending train wreck.

In Young Mothers, a French feature directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne – referred to as the Dardenne Brothers – and screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) 2025, we have four teenagers navigating their motherhood while dealing with addiction, love, unstable parents and absent partners.

Perla, Julie and Araine are new mothers, their babies only a few weeks old. Perla pesters the father of the child, a teen himself, to be with them. He is dismissive of her. For Julie, the struggle is her own addiction. She distrusts herself with the responsibilities. Araine, meanwhile, understands the precarity of the life that lies ahead. Growing up with an abusive parent, she knows the repercussions her own baby might incur and wishes to give her away.

The girls – Jessica, Perla, Julie and Araine, played by Babette Verbeek, Lucie Laruelle, Elsa Houben and Janaina Halloy Fokan, respectively – live in the maternal home in Liege, Belgium, and are at the crossroads of adulthood. There is no pregnancy glow, no time for cravings, no partner to take turns to hold the baby. Just a few good women, symbolic of their own absent mothers, at a shelter, who have their backs to help them from falling into an emotional cesspool. Jessica is due any time soon, which is when she longs for her own mother who abandoned her as a child.

The girls want to assert themselves because they have just undergone a very adult process. However, they are scared of the consequences of their assertions which further confuse them. The girls see their relationships with their children as extensions of their longings in life, with fears of guilt and abandonment creeping in every now and then.

The phenomenal thing about Young Mothers is that the Dardenne Brothers do not delve into a singular state of being. They use the complexities of the community of teenage mothers to drive the plot. The directors are aware of the impossibility of describing the process of carrying a child so they stick to teen impulses and the actors deliver extraordinarily. Shot with a handheld camera, the scenes are intimate and often anxiety-inducing, especially because it involves weeks-old children in the arms of their “child mothers”.

The Dardenne Brothers trust their viewers with the intelligence of interpretations, which was evident from the ample conversations after the screening: Was the film about the universal question of motherhood? Was it particularly intense because of undetected post-partum showing up in individual ways? Was it about assertion of identities, which subverts the trope of a sacrificial mother?

It is difficult to arrive at conclusions after watching Young Mothers but the longing for closure is a closure in itself.

Source: DIFF review: ‘Young Mothers’ by Dardenne Brothers | Hollywood