If you’ve ever dreamed of visiting Paris, you’ve probably watched ‘Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain’ at least once in your life. It’s the kind of French movie that makes you believe the French capital is this kind of magical fairyland, even though reality tends to be quite different. The innocent, light, whimsical tone of the movie makes it perfect for both kids and adults, even though you should be warned: it is possible your children will take away some practical jokes from it, so if you’re not into that, maybe don’t watch it together.
It’s also a movie that, certainly when compared to many others out there, has aged very well. The picture came out in 2001 and honestly, that’s hard to tell. Aside from some very obvious technological evolutions, the timelessness of it all is quite astonishing. At the same time, if you’re a nineties kid, you’ll find yourself dreaming of simpler times and nostalgic memories afterwards. Because even though Amélie was living in Paris and therefore doing something most of us won’t ever experience, some of her adventures are pretty relatable.
But what happened afterwards? Did Amélie and Nico stay together for the rest of their days? And did we actually get to see the real story of Amélie Poulain? Great questions that remained unanswered, as contrary to many other movies, the film never got a sequel or anything in that direction. Until now, that is, because in honor of the 22nd anniversary of the movie, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet put together a short film revealing the real story of Amélie Poulain. And as it turns out, that’s a very different one to the one we got to see twenty years ago…
The new short movie isn’t even 7 minutes long but oh my, does it reveal a lot about Amélie! It seems that while her father was working for the Direction Générale de l’Armement, little Amélie was recruited by the KGB through someone of the local communist party. She was then trained to take pictures of her father’s secret work, she learned to communicate through coded language and they even taught her how to dissimulate her fingerprints. And that’s only what happened while she was young and before the fall of the Soviet Union… Jeunet showed us a very different Amélie than the one we’re used to, that’s for sure!
