Sunday, June 17, 2007

Feel good?

Recently, I had a chance to view my first ever French movie "Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Le" (in short, Amelie). There was some high recommendations from some intellectual sources (who else can be my intellectual sources, Gnana தான்) and also from IMDB.It is such a good film that it's quality exceeds the threshold of being reviewed by me. I try to blog this for a different purpose.
Whenever I watch a good foreign movie, I always get a question in my heart - Why can't India produce or accept such movies? Why don't we accept or enjoy such down to earth, yet awesome trends? Well, this movie brought more questions about Indian movies.
To Start with, here is Amelie's story in a short version.
Amélie is a story about a young girl, named Amélie whose childhood was suppressed by her Father's concerns of a heart defect. With these concerns Amélie gets hardly any real life contact with other people. This leads Amélie to resort to her own fantastical world and dreams of love and beauty. She later on becomes a young woman and moves to the central part of Paris as a waitress. After finding a lost treasure belonging to the former occupant of her apartment, she decides to return it to him. After seeing his reaction and his new found perspective - she decides to devote her life to the people around her. Such as, a failed writer, a hypochondriac, a man obsessed with a gnome, a man who stalks his ex girlfriends, the "ghost", a suppressed young soul, the love of her life and a man whose bones are made of glass. But after consuming herself with these escapades - she finds out that she is disregarding her own life and damaging her quest for love. Amélie then discovers she must become more aggressive and take a hold of her life and capture the beauty of love she has always dreamed of.
A good review by a Mr.Spragg_s ( I stole this because as i said earlier this blog is not a review of Amelie.)
It is praised as one of the best feel good movies ever and with my knowledge about feel good movies limited to Vikraman's, Yash chopra's, Karan Johar's movies, i can reassure that a 100 times. This is what is supposed to be a feel good movie. Basically, a feel good movie is just not a movie that ends in a positive, encouraging tone , but it is that starts and goes on with that. The good thing about Amelie is that the fact that she volunteers herself to bring smiles and happiness in her friend's and everyone's lives in her day-today life. And again the beauty is the reason why she chooses it. She finds a lost treasure of a kid who lived some 30 years back in her apartment and she plans to give it back to him only to make a choice of her life- If the treasure brings a change in the man's life she will become a regular do-gooder and if not be more of an introvert. (in which she chooses the first option.)
Well, for a reader who has not witnessed the magic of Amelie ( கொஞ்சம் over தான்), the immediate question will be " Have you not seen Poove Unakkaga (Tamil) or Kal Ho na Ho (Indian) or any of Karan Johar's movies?" Mmm, the difference between the Indian feel good movies to Amelie is simply it is very simple and yet so graceful and characterised to perfection. If not clear, here are my reasons.
1) A do-gooder need not be an extrovert as Shahrukh-khan in Kal-Ho-Na-Ho who is liked by everyone in the neighborhood for his extra-ordinary skills of being cool even in harder times. Amelie on the other hand is an introvert to that extend that even when her lover (whom she has been longing for) asks if she is the one who is behind the lot of things that has happened in his recent past, she says "No" just because she do not have any idea of how to go forward after she says Yes to him. This is in precedence to the Famous "Melting down" of Amelie where in despair of just losing a great chance, Amelie sighs like a furnace and melts down like water.
2) The do-gooder need not have a bad past to start his career as a do-gooder. Like having blood-cancer or chronic heart condition or a love-failure ( which is as worse as the other two). In the case of Amelie, the bad part of her life is her childhood where she is considered to be having a heart disease ( I had a bad craze to learn French just to get the actual,full view of the commentary that goes during these scenes.). Apart from that, her life takes a turn only when she finds the lost treasure of the kid.
3) Doing good is not as complex as saving a bankrupt family business or bridging the gap between two extremes of characters or to act as a non-existing character to fight for a true love (even though the lady love was someone whom you are longing for) (whooh, too difficult to narrate even in words.) Doing good is something that can be done by bringing a change in the blind man' s normal day by describing how the day really is. ( This scene is very short, crisp and yet amazingly long in thoughts and feel-good ness).

Hoping these three points fetch me enough points to prove my original point- There is still no feel-good movie in India still now,I go towards the other reasons why I've fallen in love with Amelie.
1) Audrey Tatou- This cute actress who has also played the Agent Sophie Neveu in Da Vinci code. If only you recognised the face immediately in either of the movies ( after seeing the other movie) in only 5 minutes, you can go ahead and apply for this post. Her face is so cute and the her smiles are so kiddish and cute and she looks no more than 18 to me.
2) Paris - The romance is in the air. The art and the architecture is simply amazing and it has topped my list in my Honey-moon destinations. Though I'm no world-traveler, I truly believe that Europe has a more natural Life-style than the more-artificial American lifestyle.
3) Color treatment- The color treatment of the movie is cool. In most of the movie, the frames will be tinted with green, yet you will not find it to be irritating or monotonous. It is purely because of the shades that they have used through out the movie. For example, in the scene when her father plants the gnome in the garden, the green tint will be very light and in the scene where she finds her love in the tunnel-rail station searching for photos, the shade is a bit darker.
4) Again, Audrey tatou.. Oh my God. She is so cute.

I found some critics found this movie a bit unrealistic for its depiction of a picturesque vision of contemporary French society, a postcard universe of a bygone France with few people from ethnic minorities . If the director was trying to create an idyllic vision of a perfect Paris, the critics argued, he seemed to think that it was necessary to remove nearly all black people from the scene in order to do so. Also, it has been rejected by Cannes as it is "Uninteresting". But I really loved this movie.