Justin St. Clair
CELEBRATING REPRODUCTION:
Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, 2001

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ours is a culture obsessed with Impressionism. It translates well to tea-cozies, coffee mugs, mouse pads, greeting cards -- mass produced knick-knacks for the culturally inept. Doughy, mutton-headed, wallowing through museums in scented clouds -- the Hallmark constituency gets it, this Art, in the gift shop as well as the gallery. They come in droves, cooing and clucking like a covey of lobotomized quail: "Did you see that Monet?" "Oh, I just positively adore Renoir." During a recent Impressionist exhibit, London's Royal Academy extended gallery (and gift shop) hours round the clock to accommodate the hordes.

When asked to identify the allure of their Masters, the lotioned ladies respond with acritical precision: "Oh, the paintings are so warm," "Isn't it just obvious?" and "Blah blah blah feeling blah blah blah." They all agree Impressionism to be far superior to "that wretched twentieth-century abstraction." "Why, a small child -- or a monkey -- could paint that stuff." "Now, the Impressionists -- they were artists. They could paint." "Babble, babble, babble -- where's the gift shop?"

Walter Benjamin famously claimed that in this, the age of mechanical reproduction, the "aura" of art is doomed. The Impressionist masterworks are inescapable -- reproduced to the level of cliché. Call it aura -- call it whatever you would like -- but repetition has rendered the Impressionists about as palatable as a New Wave drum track. Monet meet... Thomas Kinkade, painter of light.

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The same "culture" that turned Impressionist art into a saccharine pile of sticky slop invented the romantic comedy. Meg Ryan, the forty-something twenty-three-year-old, is the reigning queen of this mind-numbing genre -- a genre as neatly contrived as Ryan's famous orgasm. In fact, Meg Ryan (Bethel High Prom Queen, 1979) has come, shall we say, to define the romantic comedy. Affable, cutesy, and cuddly, the bubbly blonde actress is effervescent to the point of indigestion, and, unfortunately, the platitudinous posterchild for lighthearted Hollywood fare.

Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) can best be described as a romantic comedy. Audrey Tautou -- an actual twenty-three-year-old -- stars as the movie's Meg. She plays the role of Amélie Poulain, a young woman from Montmartre, who, in the words of one reviewer "is looking for love, and perhaps for the meaning of life in general." Audrey, as Amélie, is appropriately adorable, a charming little sprite who bounds airily through the picture. The narrative takes several unlikely comic twists, Amélie eventually meets her match, and in a classic Hollywood ending, the two lovebirds ride off into the Parisian sunset on a motorbike. Sound revolting enough?

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It was a full two hours after I left the theatre that I realized I had, for all intents and purposes, just sat through a romantic comedy. Despite my disingenuous synopsis, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain is a splendid film -- surreal, enchanting, witty and well written. Audrey Tautou is adorable -- no antacid required -- a silent film pixy in stereo. Tautou's impish deportment sustains the film's magic realism; her virtuosity is reminiscent of nothing found in Meg Ryan's repertoire. (When, standing on a rooftop, Amélie wonders how many people -- at that very moment -- are having orgasms, the film jump-cuts though the city's bedrooms. With a wicked little smile Amélie turns to the camera and whispers "Quinze." Howling Meg Ryan could never have pulled that off.)

Ultimately, the film succeeds for being just that: a film. Hollywood makes few films; the glitterati of Tinseltown are too busy manufacturing "star vehicles." Celebrity -- or so I am told -- sells. It is the celebrity of Renoir, Monet, Cézanne or Degas that draws people to the galleries; we already know the excessively reproduced paintings by heart. We don't need to go to the Guggenheim, the Musee d'Orsay, or the Chicago Art Institute for visions of water lilies to dance in our heads. Target has Water Lily Potholders®, Barnes & Noble has The Sunflower Desk Calendar®, and Yankee Candles makes quite an Impression with their hand-dipped Windmills and Tulips® series. The masses get their Impressionist art at the mall; they go to the galleries for their celebrity fix. (Correction: The more pretentious go to the galleries for their celebrity fix, the less pretentious stay at the mall, head on over to the Cineplex, and take in the latest "star vehicle" featuring Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, or Mel Gibson.)

Audrey Tautou is not a star. (Or, not yet a star, in any event.) The rabble will not shell out $8 simply to watch Mlle. Tautou prance around a screen for 120 minutes. As a result, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was compelled to make a film (which, we must note, is a far cry from his last big-screen debacle, Alien: Resurrection -- the fourth installment in the abominable Alien series).

Here, due credit must also be given to Guillaume Laurant, for writing the marvelously literate film, and to Bruno Delbonnel for his compelling cinematography. Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain is playfully aware of its own artistic construction, toying incessantly with the conventions and constraints of "artistic reality" -- photographs speak, prompters appear in cellar windows, whispering comebacks to the shy, Amélie watches her own daydreams unfold on television, characters interact with the ostensibly overdubbed soundtrack -- in short, the film explodes the "realistic" principles of artistic representation. (Even the film stock contributes to this unexpected enterprise; the pale washed-out hues recall century-old hand-colored postcards, black-and-white images warmed, as an afterthought, with a splash of pastel.)

At the center of the film's devilish meditation on art is Raymond Dufayel, a hobbled figure known as "the Glass Man." Dufayel, Amélie's most eccentric neighbor, reportedly lives in a padded apartment. According to the less-than-reliable narrator, "the Glass Man" possesses bones so brittle that the most delicate accident could prove disastrous.

Dufayel is something of a painter. He has painted and repainted a single subject for twenty years: a "copy" of Renoiršs Luncheon of the Boating Party. (The faces, he admits, are the most difficult. "Sometimes," he whispers, "they change their moods behind my back.") The entire situation is so deliciously preposterous that the giggling audience is left wondering whether Monsieur Dufayel's "padded" apartment does not provide him with fond memories of institutional days gone by.

Quickly, however, we realize that "the Glass Man" is more than an element of comic relief. The wizard-like Dufayel (played, incidentally, by one Serge Merlin) possesses an otherworldly prescience. He introduces himself to Amélie by unexpectedly throwing open his apartment door as she is passing by on the stairs. Then, to our surprise (but not, perhaps, to Amélie's) he answers a question she hasn't asked.

The two begin an artistic relationship, exchanging video clips and discussing the intricacies of reproducing Renoir (or the intricacies of being Renoir, one suspects; for Dufayel is not reproducing the art of Renoir so much as he is reproducing the life of Renoir inside the frame of the film). Once again, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain cleverly complicates the conventions of artistic construction, nesting the character of "Renoir" inside that of "Dufayel" and playfully frustrating efforts to extricate "reality" from "representation." Dufayel does not reproduce Luncheon of the Boating Party from any master copy -- Dufayel is the master, painting, not copying. Nevertheless, all this mischief transpires inside the parameters of a work of art.

As Renoir, Dufayel's biggest representational challenge is a single, centrally positioned Luncheon character: the bonneted little girl who peers archly from behind a glass of water. The youngster is an enigma; the painter, unable to capture her expression, hides her behind a water glass. As we soon learn, however, the young girl and Amélie are one and the same. To better reproduce her unique expression, the artist consults the model herself, asking Amélie (as the bonneted tyke) to explain her perspective. This is art, and in this magical treatise on representation, we are disinclined to disapprove.

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Despite an agenda which privileges artistic construction over the celebrity of the artist -- the "celebrity" of Renoir, for example, is wrapped in padded bandages and shut away in a tiny apartment under the name of "Dufayel" -- Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain recognizes the cultural centrality of "celebrity worship." The specter of this twentieth century god visits the film in the form of Lady Di, the superfluous princess whose death unhinged a legion of tabloid junkies. Comically, the death of the ubiquitous royal occasions the film's storyline (in sublimely tangential fashion). Lady Di's ghost then proceeds to float in and out of the film on the lips of others: The tabloid peddler in the newspaper kiosk laments the death of a princess so young and beautiful. "It's okay if she's old and ugly?" Amélie asks. "Sure. Look at Mother Teresa," the woman replies.

Later, Amélie cleverly invokes Lady Di in an effort to avoid an unwanted conversation; she purposefully disinterests a young man by asking for his signature on "a petition to canonize Lady Di." Dufayel, however, eventually banishes Lady Dišs celebrity from the film. While taking an art lesson, a student of Dufayel's chatters on about plans to apotheosize Lady Di in an urn-bearing satellite. Dufayel explodes, screaming, "Lady Di, Lady Di, Lady Di," as the student flees the apartment. And then, in exasperation, to himself: "Renoir."

The film handles both "reproduction" and "celebrity" deftly. Reproduction is central to the discussion of art, to the construction of the film; it is unavoidable, obligatory, yet the film is fresh, adroit, and avoids the cliché. Similarly, celebrity both occasions and permeates the narrative, yet the film manages to escape the glorification of fame. The film reflects conventions without counterfeiting them.

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Hollywood will inevitably rush to take a crack at Amélie, to reproduce the magic of the French film, box office style. They'll tinker with the script, alter the shots, expand the role of a certain British royal, expurgate the nudity, dumb down the wit, eliminate the slapstick, and last but certainly not least, find a couple of big name stars to drive their vehicle to the bank. I wonder who they'll cast as Lady Di.