No French movie of this century is extra beloved than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Or moderately, no protagonist of a French movie on this century is extra beloved than Audrey Tautou’s eponymous Amélie. Therefore, little question, why the film is greatest recognized by that brief model of its title moderately than by the lengthy model, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. Now, greater than twenty years after the discharge of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jeunet has adopted it up with La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain, which you’ll be able to watch (with non-obligatory French or English subtitles) simply above.
“In any case this time,” Jeunet says in a quick introduction, “I felt the second was proper to inform you, in the end, the actual story of Amélie Poulain.” She seems, in response to his voice-over narration that follows, to not be a easy Montmartre waitress who dedicates herself to surreptitiously enriching the lives of these round her.
The truth is she works as a spy for the KGB, having first been recruited in childhood with the promise of sweet bars. Which will sound far-fetched, however Jeunet helps each element of Amélie’s double life, and of the story of her re-entry into espionage after the autumn of the Berlin Wall, utilizing the exact same scenes and involving the exact same characters we keep in mind from Amélie.
On one stage, La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain testifies to the enduring playfulness that retains Jeunet from taking his personal work — even the work that grew to become a worldwide phenomenon — too critically. (Certainly, that spirit is on show within the authentic film’s exaggeration of whimsical-French-film tropes.) Very like the Hollywoodified Kubrick trailers we beforehand featured right here on Open Tradition, this new brief additionally constitutes an indication of how the that means and influence of cinema are created not by the pictures themselves, however moderately by their context and juxtaposition. And so, with attribute cleverness, Jeunet has reinvented Amélie as a Soviet agent by using the ideas of Soviet montage.
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
