Amelie

Amélie:

Analyse the various film techniques and discuss how Jean-Pierre Jeunet has used these to create a modern fairy tale

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie is a French film (2001) is a story that follows Amélie Poulain, an odd and introverted young woman. With little purpose to her life, she finds simple pleasures in the small things as well as working at the local café in a small, fairy tale-like town where she is the innocent girl on a quest for love. This is until the night of the thirty first of August nineteen ninety seven, when her life changes dramatically. The director applies film techniques of narration, setting and special effects, including them into Amélie, creating it into a modern fairy tale.  

Jeunet uses a typical fairy tale-like narrator to establish the film as a modern fairy tale. At the very beginning of the movie the narrator presents each of the characters – describing their likes, dislikes and quirks. To a viewer this gives an insight (much like a fairy tale)that normally wouldn’t be happen and be possible, allowing to see who they are but it also sets the mood and setting for the remainder of the story. In conjunction with that, the technique of narration demonstrates a surreal but also fairy tale like element to the film (with surrealism also being a typical quality that fairy tales have) because there is no narrator in real life, making it feel more like a fairy tale. Amélie is set out in the form of a recount which is strengthened by the fact that fairy tales are usually set in the past or being told as an experience that has already happened.   Jean-Pierre Jeunet uses this film technique to help convey the message that this film is meant to parallel a fairy tale by applying each of those angles to the story. By implementing the film technique of narration in Amélie, it is successfully used in assisting to create a modern fairy tale through the film.

Jeunet applies the technique of setting to produce a specific...