Amélie (French: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, pronounced [lə fabylø dɛstɛ̃ d‿ameli pulɛ̃], lit. "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain") is a 2001 French-language romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant, the film shows a fun and imaginative view of modern life in Paris, set in the neighborhood of Montmartre. It follows Amélie Poulain, played by Audrey Tautou, a quiet and unusual waitress who tries to improve the lives of others while dealing with her own loneliness. The film includes many actors in supporting roles, such as Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta, Serge Merlin, Jamel Debbouze, Claire Maurier, Clotilde Mollet, Isabelle Nanty, Dominique Pinon, Artus de Penguern, Yolande Moreau, Urbain Cancelier, and Maurice Bénichou.
The movie was released in France on April 25, 2001, by UGC-Fox Distribution, and in Germany on August 16, 2001, by Prokino Filmverleih. Critics praised the film for Audrey Tautou's acting, the visual style, set and costume design, sound effects, editing, music, writing, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's direction. Amélie won Best Film at the European Film Awards, four César Awards (including Best Film and Best Director), and two British Academy Film Awards (including Best Original Screenplay). It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. The film was a major box office success, earning over $174 million worldwide with a budget of $10 million. It is one of the most successful French films internationally.
Plot
Amélie Poulain is born in 1974 and grows up with unusual parents who mistakenly believe she has a heart problem. Because of this, they decide to teach her at home. To deal with being alone, Amélie uses her imagination and acts mischievously. When she is six years old, her mother, Amandine, dies after a Canadian tourist jumps from the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris and lands on her. After this, her father, Raphaël, becomes more isolated. At 18, Amélie leaves home and works as a waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre, where many unusual people work and visit. She lives alone and finds joy in small things, such as putting her hand in grain sacks, breaking crème brûlée with a spoon, and skipping stones on the Canal Saint-Martin.
On August 31, 1997, Amélie is surprised by news about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. While reacting to this, she accidentally drops a plastic perfume stopper, which knocks a tile loose and reveals an old metal box hidden by a boy who once lived in her apartment decades earlier. The box contains items from his childhood. Amélie decides to find the boy and return the box to him. She promises herself that if this makes him happy, she will try to bring happiness to others.
After asking the apartment’s concierge and older tenants about the boy, Amélie meets Raymond Dufayel, a reclusive neighbor who has brittle bone disease and paints the same artwork by Pierre-Auguste Renoir every year. Raymond remembers the boy’s name as “Bretodeau.” Amélie locates the man, Dominique Bretodeau, and secretly gives him the box. Moved by the memories in the box, Bretodeau decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter and grandson. Amélie feels happy about helping him.
Amélie secretly helps others in creative ways. She guides a blind man to the Métro while describing the streets around him. She encourages her father to travel the world by taking his garden gnome, having a flight attendant friend send photos of it with famous landmarks worldwide. She helps her co-worker Georgette start a relationship with a café patron named Joseph. She convinces the concierge, Madeleine Wallace, that her abandoned husband had sent her a final love letter before his death. She plays jokes on Collignon, a mean greengrocer, which makes him stop mistreating his kind assistant, Lucien. Lucien then takes over the grocery stand.
Raymond Dufayel, watching Amélie, begins talking to her about his painting. Though he has painted the same Renoir artwork 20 times, he has never captured the look of the girl drinking water in the painting. They discuss the girl’s meaning, and Amélie begins to see herself in the image. Raymond notices this and encourages her to think about her feelings for Nino Quincampoix, a young man who collects discarded photos from passport booths. When Amélie meets Nino again, she realizes she is falling in love with him. He drops a photo album, which Amélie picks up.
Amélie plays a game of hide-and-seek with Nino across Paris before returning his album anonymously. After arranging a meeting at the café, Amélie panics and tries to hide her identity. Her co-worker, Gina, helps Nino understand Amélie’s situation, but Joseph’s comment makes Amélie think she has lost Nino to Gina. Raymond Dufayel helps Amélie gain confidence, leading to a romantic night with Nino and the start of their relationship. The film ends with Amélie experiencing a moment of happiness she has created for herself.
Production
In his DVD commentary, Jeunet explained that he first wrote the role of Amélie for the English actress Emily Watson. In the original version of the script, Amélie's father was an Englishman living in London. However, Watson's French language skills were limited, and she could not film the movie due to a scheduling conflict with another film, Gosford Park (2001). Because of this, Jeunet changed the screenplay to cast a French actress. Audrey Tautou was the first actress he considered after seeing her in the poster for the 1999 film Venus Beauty Institute.
Most of the movie was filmed in Paris. The real café where Amélie works, Café des 2 Moulins (15 Rue Lepic, Montmartre, Paris), appears in the film. Principal filming occurred from March 2, 2000, to July 7, 2000.
The filmmakers used computer-generated images (CGI) and computer animation, along with a digital intermediate process. Scenes set in a studio were filmed at MMC Studios Coloneum in Cologne, Germany. The movie shares similar themes with the second part of the 1994 film Chungking Express.
Release
The film was first shown in France, Belgium, and French-speaking areas of western Switzerland in April 2001. Later that year, it was shown at film festivals and then released in other parts of the world. It had limited showings in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australasia later in 2001.
At the Cannes Film Festival, selector Gilles Jacob said the film Amélie was "uninteresting" and did not screen it. However, the version he saw was an early version without music. This decision caused some discussion because French media and audiences had praised the film, which contrasted with Jacob’s opinion. David Martin-Jones, writing in Senses of Cinema, noted that the film clearly showed its French identity, which helped it attract both mainstream and art film audiences.
In 2021, Newen Connect’s TF1 Studio made a deal with UGC to distribute and sell its films, including Amélie. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the film was shown again in many countries, including Italy on May 11, 2021, by BIM Distribuzione.
Miramax, the film’s U.S. distributor, was sold to the Qatari company beIN Media Group in 2016. In 2020, beIN sold a 49% share of Miramax to ViacomCBS (now Paramount Skydance), which gained rights to Miramax’s film collection. In 2021, Paramount reissued Amélie on home media along with other Miramax films.
In February 2022, director Jeunet told The New York Times that Sony Pictures Classics had acquired U.S. distribution rights to Amélie from Miramax (and later Paramount). Sony planned a future re-release. While the distributor confirmed this, no further updates were shared until late 2023, when Sony announced it had acquired North American distribution rights (excluding French Canada) and scheduled a theatrical re-release in 250 U.S. theaters on February 14, 2024. Some sources say Miramax/Paramount still hold certain international rights, and Miramax lists Amélie in its library on its website.
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Amélie was re-released in UK and Irish cinemas in April 2026.
Reception
On the website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 90% approval rating based on 234 reviews, with an average score of 8.2 out of 10. The website’s critics agree that the film is a lively, imaginative movie that highlights Audrey Tautou’s performance as the main character. Metacritic, which calculates scores using a weighted average, gave the film a score of 69 out of 100 based on 31 critics, showing that most reviews were positive.
Alan Morrison of Empire magazine gave the film five stars and said it was one of the best movies of the year, comparing it to other popular films like Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Il Postino (1994). He noted that the film’s unique charm might make it even better than those films. Paul Tatara of CNN praised the film’s playful and creative style. He wrote that the movie’s imaginative and humorous tone was especially enjoyable in the first hour.
The film faced criticism from Serge Kaganski of Les Inrockuptibles, who said it showed an unrealistic and overly idealized version of old French society with few people from different ethnic backgrounds. The film’s director, Jeunet, responded by pointing out that the movie includes photos of people from many ethnic groups and that the actor playing Lucien, Jamel Debbouze, is of Moroccan descent.
The film opened in France on 432 screens and earned 43.2 million French Francs ($6.2 million) during its first week, making it the top movie in the country. It remained in the top 10 for 22 weeks and was the highest-grossing film in France for the year, earning $41 million total. It also made $33 million in the United States and Canada, becoming the most successful French-language film in North America.
Amélie was chosen by The New York Times as one of “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.” It ranked No. 2 in Empire magazine’s list of “The 100 Best Films of World Cinema.” Paste magazine placed it second on its list of the 50 Best Movies of the Decade (2000–2009). In 2016, BBC Magazine ranked Amélie at No. 87 in a poll of the greatest films of the 21st century so far.
Entertainment Weekly listed the film’s poster as one of the best in its top 25 film posters of the past 25 years. It also ranked the scene where Amélie searches for her love interest, Nino, across Paris as No. 9 on its list of the top 25 romantic gestures. In 2010, American Cinematographer magazine named Amélie the best filmed movie of the decade.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked Amélie No. 37 among the 50 Greatest Romantic Comedies of All Time. In 2021, members of the Writers Guild of America West and East voted its screenplay No. 43 on the WGA’s list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (So Far).
In 2025, The New York Times ranked Amélie No. 41 on its list of “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century” and No. 46 on its “Readers’ Choice” edition of the list.
Musical adaptation
On August 23, 2013, Dan Messe, a composer and member of the band Hem, said he would write the music for a musical version of Amélie. He worked with Craig Lucas and Nathan Tysen on the project. Messe also said he would create all new music for the show and not use the music from Yann Tiersen, who composed the film version of Amélie. The musical first performed at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in August 2015. It opened on Broadway in March 2017 and ended in May 2017. Before its Broadway run, the musical was shown at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in December 2016, with Phillipa Soo playing the main character. A version of the musical opened in London in 2020. Other productions in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland were planned or resumed after restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic ended.
The director of the original Amélie film, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, said he did not support the musical. He explained that he sold the rights to the musical to help raise money for a children's charity called Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque.
Home media
The film does not have a single company that handles its distribution worldwide. However, Blu-ray discs were released in Canada and Australia. The first release was in Canada in September 2008 by TVA Films. This version had no English subtitles and was criticized for poor picture quality. In November 2009, an Australian release occurred. This version included English subtitles and had no region coding. Momentum Pictures released a Blu-ray in the UK on October 17, 2011. Lionsgate released a U.S. Blu-ray edition in 2011 after entering a short-term deal to distribute Miramax's film library on home video. Sony Pictures released a U.S. Blu-ray in a steelbook in 2024. The film is also available in HD on iTunes and other digital download services.
In the United Kingdom, it was the tenth best-selling foreign-language film on physical home video formats in 2013. It was also the third best-selling French film that year, behind The Intouchables and Rust and Bone.
Legacy
In 2007, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) created the television show Pushing Daisies, which was described as a "quirky fairy tale." ABC wanted the show to have a similar feel to the movie Amélie, which includes themes of "whimsy and spirit and magic." The show's creator, Bryan Fuller, stated that Amélie is his favorite film. He said, "All the things I love are represented in that movie." He added, "It's a movie that will make me cry based on kindness as opposed to sadness." A review of Pushing Daisies in The New York Times noted that the influence of Amélie is evident throughout the show.
A species of frog was named Cochranella amelie. The scientist who named it explained that the frog was named after Amélie, the main character in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. The scientist said the movie highlights how small details contribute to a sense of joy in life, much like how glass frogs and other amphibians and reptiles help maintain the health of Earth. The discovery of this frog was published in the scientific journal Zootaxa in an article titled "An enigmatic new species of Glassfrog (Amphibia: Anura: Centrolenidae) from the Amazonian Andean slopes of Ecuador." The movie Amélie also inspired a painting game called Été, in which players can bring Montreal to life through painting.