Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, let’s revisit a much-adored French rom-com that will be returning to select theaters this Valentine’s Day.
When Amelie came out in 2001, I wasn’t exactly feeling it. I caught it one night during a preview screening and dozed off on it a couple times. It was too damn whimsical, like a French version of a Wes Anderson film. Here’s this tale of an adorkable, fourth wall-breaking, cafe waitress (Audrey Tautou in a star-making performance) with a Lulu bob haircut, doing all kinds of cute shit in a part of Paris that’s more quirky and colorful than any music video directed by Michel Gondry.
Not to mention that the titular character, the offspring of parents who are clearly on the spectrum (her late, headmistress mom didn’t like to be touched, while her ex-Army doctor dad doesn’t like peeing next to other guys), is kinda loopy in the noggin. When she’s not doing good-natured but weird schemes to help those around her (seeing a greengrocer verbally abuse his employee leads to her sneaking into the greengrocer’s apartment and tampering with items that’ll make his life miserable), she’s playing a cat-and-mouse game with her crush (Mathieu Kassovitz), a guy who likes retrieving discarded photos of strangers from passport photo booths. She basically gives him the runaround until she truly feels dude is definitely in love with her.
Despite what I felt about it, Amelie became a hit. After grossing $41 million in its homeland (it stayed in the top ten for 22 weeks), it eventually headed over to these parts and made $173.9 million worldwide. The critics loved the hell out of it. The New York Times’ Elvis Mitchell called it “a sugar-rush of a movie.” Our resident Classic Corner columnist Sean Burns praised it for being “hyperactively whimsical and more than a little subversive” and resembling “playful ‘60s Godard without the existential dread.” Even Chris Kattan impersonated the character on Saturday Night Live.
It’s a good thing that Amelie was a success before hitting U.S. shores. If it didn’t, Harvey Scissorhands would’ve slashed the shit out of it. Jeunet and Weinstein have had quite the dicey (pardon the pun) relationship over the years; when Weinstein wanted to re-edit Delicatessen, the 1991 debut Jeunet made with comics artist Marc Caro, the directors hit him with this ultimatum: “OK. We have another idea for a modification, you cut our names out of the credits,” Jeunet later said the movie was only popular on home video after getting a bad theatrical release.
Despite not being able to do his slicing-and-dicing thing, Weinstein eventually made Amelie an awards contender. But despite winning several overseas awards (four Cesar Awards, three European Film Awards, a couple of BAFTAs), the movie unfortunately got curved by stateside awards. According to a post on Jeunet’s own blog, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were tired of Weinstein’s bully-boy tactics and decided to shut him and his films out in 2002, the year Amelie was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Foreign Film:
“That was the year that the Academy, tired of Weinstein’s vote-collecting ‘abuse,’ decided to boycott his films. ‘We will not vote for Amélie,’ wrote the American industry magazines. Whoopy [sic] Goldberg, president of the ceremony, spent the entire ceremony making fun of Weinstein. The result being, out of 19 nominations, he won only one Oscar.”
Amelie wasn’t the last time Jeunet had to deal with Weinstein and his bullshit. When Weinstein got U.S. distribution for The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet – Jeunet’s first 3-D film – in 2015, he wanted Jeunet to re-edit it. Since Jeunet had final cut, he wasn’t changing a damn thing. Jeunet said this led to Weinstein dumping it, releasing the trailer a day before it dropped in theaters, with no press screenings or no other marketing.
Weinstein isn’t the only canceled person Jeunet has called out for dickish behavior. He put Joss Whedon on blast for the negative comments he made about Alien: Resurrection, which Whedon wrote the script for. “He’s very good at making films for American geeks – something for morons,” Jeunet said in 2022. “Because he’s very good at making Marvel films. I hate this kind of movie. It’s so silly, so stupid.”
Nevertheless, Amelie is hitting theaters again this Valentine’s Day season. The final film to come out of Miramax’s pro-French Miramax Zoe wing, it’s now being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, which distributed Jeunet and Caro’s 1995 sci-fi fantasy The City of Lost Children (my favorite Jeunet flick, by the way).
It turns out this crazy-ass tale of a girl both finding and spreading love is still beloved by fans. I recently asked my dear friends on Facebook if anyone liked Amelie, and the comments were quite enthusiastic. The Last Days of Video novelist Jeremy Hawkins said he “appreciates the film’s earnest philosophy of helping others as a way to help yourself,” even lumping it alongside such humane hangout movies as Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson and Wim Wenders’s currently-in-theaters Perfect Days. Film critic Victor Morton told me it has “a perfect combo of confectionary text and dark subtext … it resembles Hitchcock in no other way — except that.” North Carolina DJ Nick Speaks loves “how it makes Wes Anderson seem like an absolute freshman in replicating French cinema.” And Austin resident Robin Cuthbert “loved the way characters were introduced, the plot, the ridiculously twee, cute aspects, and the music. I don’t think I could watch it again and love it as much.” (She also said she “had a huge crush on Mathieu Kassovitz at the time, so that helped.”)
Looking back, it’s understandable why this film became such a critical/commercial/global darling. Released in the States two months after 9/11 (and set shortly after Princess Diana’s untimely death in 1997), Amelie was a dizzy, delightful, cinematic salve, a soothing bit of hope and happiness during a very dire time in 21st-century history. I may not have needed Amelie, but the world certainly did.
“Amelie” is back in theaters this week.
