The French movie, “Amelie,” is a very sweet tale of a girl living in Montmartre. Never receiving much positive attention from her parents while growing up, she relies on her vivid imagination to survive and feels different and invisible even as she reaches adulthood. Working as a waitress, she takes pleasure in the simple things in life and continues to see the world as a child might.The movie has some interesting characters—her co-workers in the cafe, the grocer (who she ends up tormenting because of the way he treats his slow employee), the painter who lives near her, and finally, the strange young man she falls for.
The outside scenes in the movie were filmed around Paris and mainly Montmartre (the interior scenes were filmed in a Cologne, Germany studio). It’s fun to watch the 2001 movie and recognize all the landmarks that you’ve walked by and explored. The grocery store and the café are two sights that tourists seek when visiting Montmartre. Both have capitalized on their starring roles in the movie. The Café des Deux Moulins has renamed their crème brulee after Amelie; and the grocery store proudly displays movie posters, postcards, and pictures of Audrey Tautou, who also starred as Sophie Neveu in “The Da Vinci Code.” (The picture of the café was taken by Suz.)
