You could spend a lifetime not watching Amélie

When I was a kid, maybe like ten years old, I remember standing in the checkout line at the grocery store with my parents. The till had a sticker on it. It was so long ago that I don't remember what the sticker said, but it had a picture of a woman, and she had this distinctive smile that looked like a socially anxious version of the Richard D. James Album cover. Whatever it said, I wrote it down and looked it up when I got home. Apparently it was from a French romantic comedy movie called Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain.

Ten or fifteen years later, I checked it out of the library. Now I'm going to tell you what I think about it.

It's weird to think that having watched Amélie, the experience of having actually watched the movie constitutes very little of my relationship to it. Most of that story is made up of me being occasionally reminded of it, thinking "I should watch that movie," and then deciding not to.

I like romance stories. Reading romance novels and watching romance movies makes me feel good. It's something I've spent most of my life being virtually unable to admit to myself because once upon a time, someone told me it was gay for boys to be into romance novels, and also that I'm a boy. I'm still kind of working on unlearning it, and so I think I might have to credit the film more for my experience not watching it and the effect it had on my life than I possibly can credit the film itself.

Amélie is a kind of strange movie, and it's not one I have an easy time explaining, but I think the most concise way I could put it is that it's sort of like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for Gen X. I've never actually watched Scott Pilgrim or read the comics but I've seen the way people relate to it online. Amélie is a story about a shy, lonely and very autistic woman who learns about making people happy. It feels a bit like an adult coming of age film. Over the many years I've been aware that this film exists, I've seen scraps of the lives of people who relate to Amélie the character in the same way. But it took watching the movie to see the whole picture.

It was a pretty good movie. It holds up to the ratings. I enjoyed watching it, and having watched it I'll never be able to un-watch it. Maybe ten years from now I'll watch it again.