Damn how can a woman be THAT hot and still manage to have a brain inside her head? Seriously, Ga-young Kim made me want to learn playing pool!

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie From Montmartre is a delightful story about how an adorable, but yet little quirky and introverted young French woman discovers and overcomes some defective traits which can be traced back to her childhood. And perhaps the most important of all, with the help from people around her and her own crave, Amelie learnt one precious lesson that changed her entire life.

The film begins with some very experimental scenes with an omniscient narrator introduces us the birth of Amelie. Having an emotionally distant dad who once was an army doctor and a neurotic mom who used to be a school’s principal, Amelie’s parents diagnosed her as “unsuitable for formal school education”. Therefore Amelie was then home schooled by mom, isolated from other kids or the outside world, which make this little girl resorted to immersing herself in a rather imaginative world.

At the age of 23, Amelie decided to move out from her parents’ home, be a waitress in a corner bistro in a bigger city. Though still live lonely and alone, Amelie started to connect with people around her – residents in the same building and her colleagues. One night, she accidentally unearthed a rusty little box behind the bathroom wall, presumably left by a past tenant who had lived in the flat around 50 years ago. In a whim Amelie resolved to reunite the box with the owner, so she will then “always help people” or otherwise “too bad”. At last, with the help from “glass-man” (Amelie’s neighbor), the now grandpa-age past tenant felt so overwhelmingly nostalgic in front of his childhood collections that he wept, thinking it must be an angel who bring this reunification, because the box was returned anonymously. From this moment, Amelie’s life no longer looks quite the same as it always did.

Just as what she said, “a surge of love urges me to bring harmony to this world”. Amelie transformed to a “female Zorro” who won’t hesitate to help people in need and secretly punish the wicked ones. However this Zorro has her own style to finish the missions; the merging of her very sensitive nature and the experiences drive Amelie to develop extremely intricate stratagems to accomplish her goals, so that those who were helped didn’t know who was helping them, if there was; those who were tormented thought they might be suffering from mental disorder, instead of being punished. The results satisfied Amelie not only because she always enjoys being on the backstage and looking at how people react to her play, but also more importantly, she knew everything turned out to be exactly of what she had planned. She was in total control in every single step.

And then she coincidently and constantly met Nino. Also having a colorful imaginative mind and bizarre hobbies like collecting discarded snapshots from public photo booths and reassembling them for his scrapbook, this man obviously in the first place was meant to Amelie. One day Amelie accidentally got the scrapbook which Nino left when he was rushing to run after a man, leading him to drop his bag carrying the scrapbook. As always, to return the scrapbook directly to Nino is an option she despise on. Instead she devised some very complex and intricate stratagems to let Nino search for his treasure. But this time, she did want this man to know who was helping him. So finally she disclosed her workplace, prepared to meet Nino face to face the first time.

Unfortunately things went completely wrong. Without any stratagem where Amelin could rely on, she found herself lying at Nino’s face that she was not the one he was looking for even they both know that was the most ridiculous lie. Nino was bewildered, eventually he left the bistro and Amelie literally melted to a puddle of water. The utmost clear irony is being exposed: even Zorro is capable of resolving any situation, she didn’t know how to fix her inner self. She was frustrated and angry of herself especially when she found one of her colleagues might also be interested in Nino.

Luckily, at last, Amelie discovered that she is not the only Zorro. Another Zorro has always been quieting helping her to leave the shield she has been so comfortable to. The film finished with the ending which fits its category – Comedy.

A truly engaging film which gives you goofy smile all day long and inspires audiences in many different aspects; that life is a string of many beads which are very tiny and ordinary but far from meaningless or useless, that we can always find another method to covey our messages even they were not listened at the first time, that people do know when you help them genuinely even not explicitly, that we sometimes need to step out our comfort zone with enormous courage in order to advance of what we are…