Amelie In The Movie Theater example essay topic

Jean Pierre Jeunet's film 2001, Amelie, is about a girl called Amelie who works as a waitress in Paris. Her life changes around when she returns a box of childhood treasures hiding behind a wall to its grown up owner. Amelie sees the happiness of the person she returned the box to and decides to straighten out other people's lives by making it better or sometimes by making it worse when she thought the person deserved it. Jeunet conveys the sense of reality and fantasy with the use of colors. In the scene that the narrator is telling the viewer about what Amelie likes, Jeunet uses the colors black, green and red. The first shot of the scene begins with Amelie in the movie theater.

The camera starts off with a close-up shot of Amelie's face and it slowly pans across the people's face sitting behind her. The seats in the movie theater are bright red and the people's clothing is mostly green. The colors red and green give the viewer a sense of fantasy and fairy tale. Fairy tales are usually connected to big luscious green woods and beautiful princesses dressed in red. Jeunet shows the feeling of people watching movies in the movie theater with the use of the color red and green. People live through fantasies when they watch movies because everything is so perfect and amazing.

The use of the color green and red is used to convey the sense of happiness and fantasy people feel when they watch movies. Part of the happiness can also be seen through the smile of the people sitting behind Amelie. Jeunet uses the color black, through the use of clips from old movies, in the third and fifth shots to contrast reality and fantasy of films. The third shot is a clip from an old movie of two people kissing, but as pointed out by Amelie, there is some type of insect crawling in the background of the scene. The reality of love and romance in films is conveyed through the insect crawling through the scene making the "perfect love scene" imperfect and flawed. When we watch the films we forget about the reality and overlook the insect which represents the imperfect.

But, at the same time, Jeunet uses a clip from an old movie on the fifth shot to convey the fantasy existent in films. Two people are in a car driving down the street but the driver is driving without looking at the road. The contradiction of the reality and fantasy in films is conveyed through the black and white in the old movies. In the seventh shot, tilting is used to transition from Amelie's face to the beans she is touching. As the camera tilts the viewer can see that Amelie is wearing a red dress like the princesses in the fairy tales. At the end of the shot, Amelie is shown touching green beans that represent the fairy tale world she reaches for after her life is turned around.

Amelie straightened people's life by making their lives like a fairy tale where everything is perfect and happy. Amelie's red dress and the shot of the curves of her body give the viewer a sense of sexuality and love which is also the part of the fairy tale world. The redness of her dress and her body sets the viewer up for the later sex scenes in the movies. The ninth shot of the scene shows Amelie wearing a red dress in St. Martin's Canal. The camera angle starts off in Bird's eye view and it slowly tilts to show Amelie skipping stone. The water that was supposed to be blue is shown in a shade of green as if it was reflecting the green trees surrounding the water.

The greenness and her red dress convey the sense that Amelie is living in a world of fairy tales and she is the princess trying to make her world perfect, the way it should be. Jeunet's choice of color in the movie is well used to convey the main point of the movie, the fantasy world that Amelie lives in. The use of the fifth shot reminds the viewer about the reality of life that viewers forget about when they watch movies like Amelie where everything is like a fairy tale. The colors red, green and black set the viewer up for the mood of the movie with the sense of fairy tale and the tasks Amelie tries to accomplish.