Amelie Reflection

Amelie, a beautifully constructed French film, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, colourfully paints the fictional tale of a young French woman named Amelie. The story begins in a rather unusual way, through a series of seemingly arbitrary events that inexplicably lead up to Amelie’s birth, which makes the film that much more intriguing and appealing to the spectator. Jeunet’s unique style does not stop after the exposition. The exposition’s upbeat, playful, and creative style merely whets the appetite of the audience for what is to come. Following the explanation of Amelie’s birth the narrator gives a detailed description of what each character is like and why, starting with Amelie’s odd and particular family. The typical film will let each character’s …show more content…
Without the meticulously plotted narrative, the chain of cause and effect events, the film would not have had such a magical and impactful effect on it’s viewers and here is why. Each character is presented in such a way, through the development of the narrative, to add to the quirky, unique, and lively nature of the film and vice versa; the narrative would not be the way it is without the help of it’s character’s reactions and actions to each event that occurs in the narrative. The exploration of the relationship between character and narrative in Amelie is a path with many forks along the way. This essay is going to explore the relationship between narrative and character in Amelie, more specifically on the way that the two are codependent on one another. The relationship between the two is a major component in revealing and understanding the quirky and unique nature of the …show more content…
“If we do go on to be moved by engaging with the character on the level of allegiance, our responses are a tangent to those of the character: they are acentral, sympathetic rather than empathetic…in order to respond emotionally this way, the perceiver must first understand the narrative situation…”. Before the spectator can even begin to understand the character, we need to understand the narrative. Understanding the narrative situation first and foremost involves understanding the causality; the logical understanding of why a character has acted in a certain way: what event led the character to act or react in a certain way or what has caused the particular event to happen to said character. For example, throughout the film Mr. Collignon constantly abuses his worker, Lucien and Amelie constantly sees these acts of abuse. Even though the sequence of events building up to these particular scenes has portrayed Amelie as a harmless character, the spectator is still able to piece together previous events, where she goes out of her way to make help others, and is able to understand and even predict the upcoming act that Amelie performs when she breaks into Mr. Collignon’s apartment and vandalises some of his belongings. Even though she has done wrong to one character, it was only to help out Lucien. This change in the narrative