My paper performs a feminist analysis of the role of the female protagonist in the recent blockbuster comedy about life in Paris: Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) and examines the representation of city spaces to depict everyday life in France. Why are women assigned the repair work to alleviate the tedium of everyday routines? Do they embrace this responsibility or rebel against it? Which class markers and codes are endorsed in the representation of ordinary people and urban locations, and on whose bodies are they inscribed? What happens to the subaltern body of the beur in this nostalgic fantasy of a social structure and nation? I argue that Jeunet's film gives us a sanitized stereotype of French identity as "white" and middle-class and that class tensions play a veiled but structurally crucial role in the fantastically unitary petit bourgeois universe of Amélie. Even though the main characters have working class occupations, their lifestyles mimic the leisured middle class. The actual working class is depicted as an underclass of childlike beurs who need to be disciplined and held to a reductive standard of French culture.

The outright antagonism between the shopkeeper and his beur salesclerk and deliveryman Lucien is repeated in an attenuated form in the friendship between the reclusive retiree M. Dufayel and Lucien. M.Dufayel becomes a parental figure both to Lucien and Amélie, but the advice he dispenses is tinged with monocultural xenophobia. For instance, Lucien receives painting lessons and turns out to be a far more talented portraitist of urban working-class crowds than his teacher. But instead of receiving praise for his use of bold color and his originality, his technique is criticized and he is told to reproduce the kitschy model of Renoir's guinguette scene, to which an elusive interiority is ascribed.

Amélie waitresses in a bistro frequented by a range of more or less eccentric regulars. She moves between her place of work, her own apartment building, her father's house in suburbia, the train station, a porn shop, a fun fair, the Sacré Coeur, and many other quaint or eccentric destinations in the city. In a plot that teeters on the edge of sappy nostalgia, Amélie is on a maverick quest to restore treasured pieces of the lost past to people in her orbit and finds true love into the bargain. Amélie performs a surreal twisting of daily routines, thereby transforming them into exotic events, perhaps even little fables that teach a moral. Home and the neighborhood are the privileged places for these interventions. Despite the passage of time, these locations are intact, memories and buried desires can be reclaimed in most cases and a new social network of hyper- individuated personages establishes itself around Amélie's stratagems. The film's optimistic tone suggests that we just need to change our perspective on the everyday to infuse it with pleasure and excitement. There is no realistic portrayal of anomie and alienation in the urban workplace, nor are fragmentation, acceleration and rendundancy confronted as inherent conditions of modern living.

Using Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" to analyze the style politics of the films and the notion of iconic Frenchness they promote, I will show that this imaginary France of bricoleur individualist relies on contrastive "propping" by an underclass, which performs essential routines. I will end my presentation with a comparison between Amélie and Les Triplettes de Belleville (Sylvian Chomet, 2003), a more recent film which also depicts France as a nation of bricoleurs. However, contrary to Jeunet, Chomet satirically exposes and deconstructs national stereotypes the French and Americans hold about each other.