As a result, Nino still tends to shy away from others, but in a different way. Now, Nino didn't have the same isolated existence Amélie did growing up. Both Nino and Amélie need to find a way to actually end their isolation and connect with other people. Sure, they're magical, but they're not enough. All Amélie and Nino find, really, are pieces of the lives of other people. Other things, like whenever he heard a funny laugh, he'd tape it."Īll of this collecting, though, doesn't really add up to real life. His co-worker tells Amélie, "He took pictures of footprints in wet cement. Just as Amélie collects things literally-like skipping stones-and figuratively-like good deeds, Nino also tries to collect things both tangible and ephemeral. We're told they grew up "five miles apart both dreamed of having a brother and sister to be with all the time." How different their lives would have been, maybe, if they'd known each other as children. Amélie's sheer creativity must come out of a need to rebel against this mind-numbing existence.Nino Quincampoix and Amélie are kindred spirits living in the same city, yet somehow they've never met each other before. It's almost as if these two people are so scared of life that they have to compulsively organize and clean everything, all the time in order to keep life at bay. Amandine was a shaky-nerved schoolmistress who liked "figure skaters' costumes on TV, polishing the parquet, emptying her handbag, cleaning it out, and putting everything back." This lines up with her husband's interests, which include "peeling large strips of wallpaper, lining up and shining his shoes, emptying his toolbox, cleaning it out, and putting everything back." They're not fun and whimsical like Amélie and Nino, though Raphaël and Amandine are both cranky, cold, and very, very particular. Like Amélie and Nino, Raphaël and his dead wife seem to have been soulmates. Raphaël built a shrine in the yard in Amandine's honor, but Amélie doesn't ever seem to miss her at all. A suicide jumper fell on top of her, which killed her (and the jumper). In the end, it works.Īmélie's mother, Amandine, died when Amélie was a girl. This serves as a way for Amélie to both jab at her father and to inspire him to do some traveling of his own. So Amélie steals the gnome and turns her dad's life into a real-world Travelocity commercial, having her flight attendant friend mail the old coot photos of the gnome around the globe. ![]() Instead of moping around the house, tending to his dead wife's shrine and painting his garden gnome, Amélie thinks he should travel. Still, he's her father, and even if he's never been affectionate, Amélie wants him to live a full life. We have to wonder if he ever had a childhood, or if he was born a full-grown grumpy man. Our first description of this dude, an ex-army doctor, is "tight lips, hard heart," and when Amélie asks him later how he would feel if someone found a "precious relic from childhood," he says that nothing like that exists. It seems like he's been cold and distant since his wife died, but actually he's always been that way. ![]() Amélie visits her father, Raphaël Poulain, every week via train for some of the most miserable father-daughter lunches we've ever seen.
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