The idea that Amélie’s greatest trouble is vulnerability is a conceit corroborated by other characters in the film. As Krieder describes it, “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” This line has since been re-purposed in many memes, in a way similar to the one below: Perhaps the most famous line of any Tim Kreider (an essayist who writes for a variety of magazines including the New Yorker and Medium) piece comes from within his New York Times essay, “I Know What You Think of Me.” In this essay, Kreider explores the discomfort of being observed by those we love- faults and all. It was actually something addressed in a meme - bear with me. On a recent rewatch, I was reminded why it is such a lovely picture and with an extra few years of experience, I was also able to recognize a theme I hadn’t seen before. Intrigued by the previews, I started to watch Amélie and immediately fell in love. But then one night, while babysitting a kid who had already been put to bed, I finished my book and was left with nothing else to do. I was fourteen and would not have considered myself a “movie person.” Sure, I went to theaters but ask me to name a favorite film and I’d scramble for something my dad had made me watch that I thought would make me sound cultured. My own experience with the movie originates around five years ago. Shot in over eighty Parisian locations and under the whimsical gaze of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie is a one of a kind of classic. With imaginative zeal and introverted coyness, Amélie makes a tentative foray with first love and orchestrates similar joys for many (including but not limited to setting up a hypochondriac coworker with an obsessive patron at work and persuading her father to travel by having a flight attendant friend take pictures of his stolen garden gnome in locations around the world). After she stumbles upon a small tin of childhood secret treasures from a boy who lived in her apartment forty years before, Amélie makes a vow to herself that if she is able to return the tin to the man who it once belonged to with positive results, she will spend the rest of her life discreetly committing similar acts of kindness. Throughout the movie we follow the eponymous protagonist, Amélie (Audrey Tautou), who in the wake of a troubled and isolated childhood is striking out on her own as a waitress in the center of Paris. Looking back on Amélie with two decades of hindsight, it’s still very easy to tell what enraptured viewers so many years before.
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