The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie’s Philosophy

The casual philosophy I practice is about examining life with the goal of discovering (and re-discovering) how to live well. Art and media are full of suggestions about how to live and what to believe. I ask the question “What does this movie tell us about life and how we should live?”

Amélie

(Spoilers)

Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, or Amélie for short) is a French movie about an imaginative woman who finds joy in helping others break out of their comfort zones and her own struggle with her comfort zone and isolation.

There are three things the movie Amélie tells us about living well: The Ordinary is Beautiful, The Ordinary is Significant, and Comfort Zones and Routines Need Examination and Destruction

1. The ordinary is beautiful

Amélie the movie and Amélie the character constantly recognize the beauty, profundity, and significance of everyday happenings.

At the beginning of the film Amélie is isolated, but not lonely. She spends her time people watching, using her imagination, noticing small things, and enjoying little pleasures like dipping her hand in sacks of grain and skipping rocks.

Our lives could be richer if, like Amélie, we would be happy experiencing simple everyday life-things. We have grand expectations but if we liked the things that were actually around us everyday, we’d be happy a lot more often. If we only get happiness and satisfaction from Big Rare things like getting a raise, being recognized for some great accomplishment, or receiving an expensive gift, we won’t be happy that often. But, if we let life bring us joy in the tiniest parcels: the warmth of the sun or watching a bird hop around a parking lot, we would be joyful a lot more often.

Think about the effect of the “At this moment” montages Amélie uses to frame the narrative. When the movie tells us about a blue fly landing on a street in Montramarte, and about the two glasses dancing in the wind at a restaurant, we become grounded in the world of Amélie’s France. Likewise, by noticing what is happening in our world, we can ground ourselves.

Amélie is telling us that we should foster in ourselves a Joy In the Merely Real. Let’s love the way life actually is, and not cling to Fantasies, Grand Expectations, and Mysteries.

In the film Amélie does have several grand fantasies. She fantasizes about dying early and about being memorialized like Lady Di. When Amélie breaks from her pattern of appreciating the ordinary, it’s always to wallow in self pity and other bad feelings. We might love Amélie for her imagination, but she makes mistakes in wallowing in it. We should learn from Amélie and avoid using our imaginations to close our eyes to realty. Instead we ought to use our imagination to jumpstart our fascination with reality.

2. The Ordinary is Significant

Amélie also recognizes that small coincidences and events can change people’s lives. Amélie’s isolated adult life results from a series of small unfortunate coincidences. In the beginning of the film we learn that the only time her father touched her during her childhood was during medical checkups. Amélie’s heart beat abnormally every time he listened to it simply because she enjoyed the familial contact. Her father mistakenly concluded that she had a heart problem and her parents decided to homeschool Amélie — for her health, of course. Amélie didn’t have any schoolfriends so she grew into the habit of solitude.

The movie also explores the kind of things that people like and dislike. What is interesting about what the narrator lists for each character is that they are not Big Grand Things like world peace or war. The things that actually matter to peoples lives are little. Nino collects small things — ripped up photos, footprints, laughs — things that fascinate Nino would ordinarily be overlooked, forgotten, thrown away. Nino’s collections are very important to him, compelling him to chase after Amélie and go through one of her her “stratagems” to get his album back. While most people don’t have eccentric collections like Nino, the things that people hold closest to their hearts are probably not that important to others.

If we keep in mind the nature of the things that other people care about, we might be able to understand their feelings about things that at first glance don’t seem to be a big deal. We can also realize that the things that cause the most turbulence in our own mind are probably just as small. Reflection and perspective can calm the storm a bit.

3. Comfort zones and routines need examination and destruction

This movie celebrates the ordinary, but it also points out the flaws in being stuck in unexamined routines and comfort zones. Routines and rituals are useful — they make life easier to live. They give us a pattern to follow. We know they work. If we had to think about every step of getting ready in the morning, we’d never get to work on time. But, like the characters in Amélie we get stuck in our patterns. We can get stuck in these patterns that worked once, but might not be optimal to our goals and values now. If we overlook our routines and take them for granted, we can create a system of dissatisfaction and regret. Dominique Bretodeau lived a life-pattern that didn’t include his adult daughter. Maybe this habit grew out of a desire to give his daughter space as she became an adult. Maybe it came out of a disagreement. It doesn’t matter how it came about, but it continued without examination for so long that there was a good chance he would miss being part of his grandson’s life. Amélie disrupted his routine by reuniting him with the cigar box full of his childhood memories.

Life’s funny.

To a kid, time always drags.

Suddenly you’re fifty.

All that’s left of your childhood fits in a rusty little box.

You got kids, Miss?

I have a daughter about your age.

We haven’t spoken for years.

I heard she had a child, a boy.

His name is Lucas.

It’s time I looked them up, before I’m in a box myself.

Amélie disrupted his routine with the Cigar box, leading Dominique Bretodeau to examine his life and destroy a pattern that would’ve led him to regret.

Throughout the film we become familiar with the comfort zones and patterns of various characters. Amélie devises sneaky “stratagems” which cause other characters to take a step back from their routines and examine them. Amélie encourages other characters, through bizarre disruption to reflect on the path their lives are taking. Most of the characters change, and become better for it. In the cases where characters don’t break from their routine, don’t acknowledge flaws with hem them, or come back them, we see that they aren’t happy.

Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have a disruptive force like Amélie in our lives, so we have to be our own Amélie.

If we don’t have an Amélie, and don’t want to rely on chance to disrupt our routines, we should make it a routine to look at our routines and what they are doing to us. Every weekend or once a month, we ought to put on that Amélie face and imagine how she’d try to change and improve our lives. In what ways am I stagnating, and what radical thing could I do to knock myself off that path? What would it feel like to something radically different?

Amélie encourages us to try something we never do. Its easy to say “try something new” But the new is scary. So, just like Amélie, we should recruit friends help us out. Amélie’s neighbor, Raymond Dufayel — “The Glass man” — pushes Amélie to finally reach out and form a relationship with Nino. Her coworker Gina also helps out and makes sure that Nino is a good guy. It took a team for Amélie to break out of her shell, but when she did, we can see her joy.

Reflections

— What is beautiful around me right now?

— What are 3 everyday things I find Joy in?

— Am I caught up in any Fantasies?

— What are my current routines?

— How are they helping me? How could they be hurting me?

— Where are my comfort zones?

— What is something I could do this month that would disrupt me in an Amélie-ish way?

— Who could be my Glass Man and help me try something new?