Amelie - 2001

Amélie is a 2001 romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Its original French title is Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain meaning "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain". Written by Jeunet with Guillaume Laurant, the film is a whimsical depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre. It tells the story of a shy waitress, played by Audrey Tautou, who decides to change the lives of those around her for the better, while struggling with her own isolation. The film was an international co-production between companies in France and Germany.
Amélie won Best Film at the European Film Awards; it won four César Awards (including Best Film and Best Director), two BAFTA Awards (including Best Original Screenplay), and was nominated for five Academy Awards.
Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a young woman who had grown up isolated from other children. After the death of her mother and her father's subsequent withdrawal, she developed an unusually active imagination to ward away the feelings of loneliness. Now at the age of twenty-three, Amélie is a waitress at The Two Windmills, a small café in Montmartre that is staffed and frequented by a collection of eccentrics. Having spurned romantic relationships following a few disappointing efforts, she finds contentment in simple pleasures and letting her imagination roam free.
On 31 August 1997, Amélie, shocked upon hearing the news of Princess Diana's death on television, drops a bottle cap that knocks into a bathroom wall tile and loosens it. Behind the tile, she finds an old metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier. Fascinated by this find, she resolves to track down the now adult man who placed it there and return it to him, making a promise to herself in the process: if she finds him and it makes him happy, she will devote her life to help bring happiness to others.
In his DVD commentary, Jeunet explains that he originally wrote the role of Amélie for the English actress Emily Watson; in the original draft, Amélie's father was an Englishman living in London. However, Watson's French was not strong, and when she became unavailable to shoot the film, owing to a conflict with the filming of Gosford Park, Jeunet rewrote the screenplay for a French actress. Audrey Tautou was the first actress he auditioned having seen her on the poster for Venus Beauty Institute. The filmmakers made use of computer-generated imagery and a digital intermediate. The studio scenes were filmed in the Coloneum Studio in Cologne (Germany). The film shares many of the themes in the plot with second half of the 1994 film Chungking Express.