Marie-Pierre Caquot-Baggett studies the intersection between culture and politics, nation and globalism, esthetics and ideology in Amélie. First, she presents and re-examines the polemics around the film started by critic and journalist Serge Kaganski, who attacked Amélie for depicting a retrograde, nostalgic, idealized, and reactionary France dating back to the 1950s: an "ethnically cleansed, montmartro-retro-franco-franchouillard" France, as he famously wrote in the pages of the magazine "Les Inrockuptibles." Focusing on the film's representation of "home" (Paris in particular), Dr. Caquot-Baggett subsequently explores the visual, social, and narrative elements as well as the "feel" and form(s) of the film to determine whether or not it can be read as a nostalgic, right-wing paean to a mythical and timeless France, or even, as Kaganski argued, as a "video clip for Jean-Marie Le Pen's 2002 Presidential campaign" and his National Front party. Challenging Kaganski's virulent attack, she argues that while Amélie can indeed be read in that way, it can also be interpreted as an example of "accented cinema" as defined by Hamid Naficy. She shows that in contrast to the images of stability, unity, autochtonous life and picturesque "home/land" that do exist in the film, images of travel, fragmentation, transition and change also proliferate to produce another, quite different "postmodern" definition and representation of national identity.