The French enthusiasm surrounding Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain), 2001, has focused primarily on the film's ability to make its audiences feel good. Critical reviews of the film have, for the most part, also drawn on the film's potential to evoke a certain day-to-day happiness which some annoyed intellectuals, led by journalist Serge Kaganski, perceive as an alarming "retro-esthetic publicity" of a "Paris village."1 This happiness carefully constructed in Amélie finds its roots in the recent French phenomenon of a return to minuscule pleasures of daily life, 'le petisme.'

Petisme surfaces in many forms and situations: the importance of local products, the restructuring of large corporations into autonomous units and a current demand for proximity. It is first a reaction to and a concern about everything that is gigantic or growing in France, that is globalization, crime, ordinary violence, unemployment, hypermarchés and the loss of individual identity in the technological age. Petisme bears homage to the little things. It prioritizes the local, the immediate, that which can be quickly rectified, and implies a diversion from the larger issues. It centers on the familiar, resulting in a withdrawal into oneself.

Jeunet's film taps into this need for a diversion from a mistrust and growing malaise in a France facing the rise of globalization, increasing cultural diversity, a growing lack of confidence in governmental institutions, public security and the economic climate. Amélie remains well anchored in its socio-historical and cinematic period, exploiting the same issues of loneliness and isolation found in recent French socio-realist cinema, while proposing a fragmented and biased version of Parisian life.

The goal of this paper is to analyze the extent to which Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain illustrates diverse problematics of a return to reassuring images d'Épinal and pleasures calling upon a "French" collective memory, while satisfying a certain ethnocentricity and reinforcing mono-cultural stereotypes.

___________________________________________________
1Serge Kaganski, "'Amélie' pas jolie," Libération 31 May 2001. Kaganski's article sparked an entire scandal around Amélie and gave birth to numerous critical articles and editorials for and against the film. Kaganski's response "Pourquoi je n'aime pas Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain" appeared in Les Inrockuptibles, May 2001.