Amelie Film Analysis

Throughout the history of French cinema, numerous directors have chosen to set their films with the background of a traditional, nostalgic France, especially when set in the city of Paris. These films tend to feature a setting of a “stereotypical France” -or with elements people tend to think of when France is brought up- with prim and proper people and brightly colored, clean streets devoid of any trouble or complication. A countless amount of these films also tend to star a fully white cast to portray the old, outdated “white France” that is an unrealistic representation of the different cultures that now exist in the country today. Films like these, while often successful, are an inaccurate representation of France in its current state
This method further portrays France in a favorable light as it makes it seem like the streets are unblemished and the people proper. It also sets the scene and adds a positive emphasis to the movie in general.. For example: the highly successful movie Amelie, a Romance/Comedy directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet in 2001, utilizes a bright background with recurring themes of red, yellow, and green. This vibrant color scheme adds to the playful, quirky aspect of the movies leading character Amelie Poulain and her journey through Paris helping others around her, which eventually leads her to helping herself and falling in love. This particular film also features a version of Paris that is “a thoroughly sanitised version of the real thing—Paris inside the ‘periferique’ (the ring road around the city)—clean, tidy, free from honking cars, tourists, too many foreigners and other complications” (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/08/amel-a28.html). For his movie, Jeunet depicted the streets of Paris as cleaner and calmer than they are in reality in order to paint his country well and set a satisfying backdrop for the film. To aid in this process, Jeunet decided to shoot a portion of the film’s scenes in Cologne, Germany, though the majority of them were still shot in
In films such as Polisse, which can be described as a Crime Drama, France is not depicted as bright and cheery as it is in other movies such as Haute Cuisine, where a strong woman is empowered when she is given the position of the President’s personal chef at the Élysée Palace, considered to be a “man’s job” or The Chorus where a teacher lifts the spirits of troubled young boys at a strict boarding school through kind dedication and the power of song. Polisse, rather, is a shocking, disturbing film about a group of police officers, who are rough around the edges, though they care deeply inside, in the Child Protective Unit working on difficult cases in order to fight for children that have been abused, usually by family members. Polisse’s filming seems to be something that is unusual to most viewers; it has an “unusually realistic tone – not exactly gritty in the style of traditional cop dramas that make a point of it, but rough and uncompromising, both in its depiction of the subtle predators among us and in its blistering sense of humor, which seems to have emerged as a necessity for officers who no longer are shocked by anything” (http://moveablefest.com/moveable_fest/2012/05/maiwenn-polisse-interview.html).Due to the distressing subject manner, when Maïwenn, who also stars in the movie as the reserved case photographer