WATCH OUT WORLD

I chose these films because they were the best examples I could find for my students to get the right idea for the introduction to this section. The Alice in wonderland has some good examples for how image placement uses the captions effectively.

from Cinefantatique
AMELIE, the delightful French romantic comedy that became a hit on the U.S. art house circuit in 2002, weaves several threads into a single story. Amelie (Audrey Tautou) is a young waitress who has grown emotionally distant because of her childhood, withdrawing into her own imagination. She starts to come out of her shell after the accidental discovery of a childhood cache of mementos in her apartment, presumably left behind by a previous tenant. She resolves to reunite the objects with their owner, but without revealing herself. Her success leads to a series of attempts to intervene in other people’s lives (including that of her widowed father, whose garden gnome she sends on a trip around the world, as a way of goading him into traveling himself), but she avoids taking credit for her successes.

In short, Amelie is a neurotic, living out an extremely complex life involving intricate plans that conform to her inner life, instead of taking the simple, obvious path that would occur to anyone else. (The film’s full French title, which translates roughly as ‘The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain,’ suggests the character’s world view better than the pithier Americanized version.) This way of life, turning every step into an adventure, is what makes her interesting as a character, but we can also see how it is interfering with her own life. Fortunately, her path crosses with a young man (Matthieu Kassovitz), who has a strange obsession of his own: collecting discarded snapshots form public photo booths and reassembling them for his scrapbook. It’s obvious from the first that these two are meant for each other, but the question is how will they ever get together? Amelie embarks on a series of stratagems that make her seem intriguing by keeping herself at a distance, briefly glimpsed at a distance or heard over the telephone, but always delaying a close-up meeting. It’s as if she’s afraid that the reality will not live up to expectations, and the question is whether she is really in control of the situation, or is the situation controlling her? All her strategy seems designed to arouse her would-be lover’s attention, but at the same time she seems incapable of breaking out of her habitual behavior in order to finally meet the man of her dreams.

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