Two hours of kitsch tomfoolery: Amélie at the Criterion reviewed

The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the unloved’. Some rate Amélie as the worst film ever made in France. Some consider it the worst film ever made. Our heroine is a 20-year-old waitress, a sort of proto-Greta, who plays truant from her restaurant job and wanders around Paris doing nice things to random strangers. Her inspiration is a box hidden by a child in her apartment 40 years earlier which she wants to restore to its original owner. Or, as the clunky narrator puts it, ‘Why is she holding that box like her future is inside it?’

Amélie’s odyssey brings her into contact with all kinds of misfits, pests and layabouts who belong in a magic realist novel. Her chief suitor is a brain-damaged drifter who collects mug shots abandoned in photo booths. She meets a fig merchant in the market who kisses each piece of fruit he sells. At work in her restaurant, she’s serenaded by a pretentious French scribbler who tells her, ‘Ahm collecteeng people’s lacks and dislacks for an epique poem.’ We hear an excerpt from his masterpiece. ‘The night was,’ he declaims. Later we learn that this is the entire poem. A character named the Glass Man tells Amélie that his skeleton is too brittle to endure physical contact. ‘I’d shake your hand but mine would break.’ Is this character a mere lunatic or a make-believe figure from a cartoon?

The blurring of fact and fiction make it hard to invest any emotional interest in Amélie or her prattling escorts. In its favour, the show has decent costumes and stylishly atmospheric lighting. The dancing musicians fling themselves into their routines with gusto.