No blood, no action? "Amelie" (2001) has conquered the hearts of people all around the world in a style which might signal a change in the perceptions of mainstream cinema.
This past year we have seen a strange phenomenon: people all over the world gave in to the charm of a French girl with Bambi eyes.
This fairy-tale for adults, a French version of magical realism, at first seemed to critics both too fantastic and too sweet.
The Cannes Film Festival refused to include the film in the competition, seeing it as a mere "trifle."
A review from British paper The Guardian opened with the headline: "a Parisian fairy-tale with an adorable woman devoting her life to helping others? Peter Bradshaw finds it all too gooey to take."
Yet the audiences think otherwise.
"Amelie" was nominated for five Oscars: for best foreign language film, best original screenplay, best art direction--set decoration, best sound and best cinematography.
Though it didn't win any of them, it won innumerable awards from a diverse range of festivals around the world.
Those include: BAFTA, Chicago Film Critics Association, Chicago International Film Festival, Czech Lions, French Cesars, Goya Award, and Independent Spirit Award, among others. Interestingly, many of those were audience awards.
Can it be that we are tired of mass-produced stories?
After all, most of them perpetuate ideas which are not that pleasant to live with in the long run -- be better than everyone else, be the sexiest, the fastest, the toughest, show little emotion -- or else you die.
The characters on screen are rich and beautiful, or beautiful and adventurous.
We stay in the shadow of the movie theater, but we try to escape it. They live exciting lives which, let's face it, are at least as fantastic compared to our mundane worlds as any magic realism could be.
There is nothing exciting in the life of Amelie, played by Audrey Tautou.
Her childhood was not to be envied -- her mother died early and her father was an extremely dry and reserved man.
He touched her only to perform a routine health check, and since the little girl's heart would flutter with excitement, she was diagnosed with a cordial malfunction and sentenced to a life of enclosure at home.
Amelie's current job as a waitress in Paris does not offer many adventures, either.
Yet, Amelie seems to be endowed with a wonderful gift of a child-like wonderment at the world, an ability to appreciate things for what they are and just because they are.
And so this objectively dull world is transformed into a land of wonder, a land of excitement. Who will forget the scene when little Amelie sticks one raspberry on each finger of both hands and then eats all ten as fast as possible?
The magic that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet creates for us in "Amelie" is in a sense much more real than the most realistic cinematography of many American films. It is a subjective magic of the small, every-day miracles.
The film is a tale about humanity, and about love. About the need for love and the potential to love in every one of us. And about the redeeming power of love.
It is also a celebration of life itself, a celebration of how good it is to simply be alive. To be a witness to all those unpredictable things happening all around you.
While "Amelie" is film full of faith and life, it does not idealise it.
Jeunet, as his previous masterpieces "Delicatessen" (1991) and "The City of Lost Children" (1995) can prove, is not a director to be accused of ignoring the cruel side of life. His work has always been a bizarre mixture of fantasy and reality, beautiful decor and nightmare.
Only in "Amelie," the usual component of nightmare has been treated as lightly as a beautiful dream. It is humour and distance that make the cruelty in Amelie's world so benign.
What is terrible -- like Amelie's childhood, or the shopkeepers' treatment of a mentally retarded boy -- is shown simply as a peculiar and ridiculous side of life. This implies that, like anything else, it can be influenced and changed.
Only after we leave the cinema, could the question arise -- gosh, so what actually happened in this film? But as much trouble as we might have answering that question, there will be a feeling that all those wonderful things can happen to use, too.