Inspiring film that injects cheerfulness into French lives

A lonely little girl grows up in a Paris suburb, playing childhood games and practical jokes that make up the opening scenes of The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain. After her mother is killed by a tourist falling off Notre Dame Cathedral, Amelie is raised by her cold, grieving father.

Then, as a waitress in Montmartre, she silently observes those around her; until the day Amelie discovers a little boy's treasure box, hidden behind a board in her tiny apartment. She determines to find the man who left it there decades earlier. If he is moved by it, she will involve herself in the lives of others.

Since Amelie Poulain opened on April 25th, nearly five million French people have seen it. The film has taken in £17 million, the sort of profits usually reserved for US blockbusters. It has been sold to 35 countries and will be released in Ireland on October 5th.

Most French audiences stand up and applaud when the film finishes. The public pour out on to the pavements, smiling and parroting the advertising blurb that calls it "a moment of pure happiness that makes you love life, that makes you love people."

Audrey Tautou, the 22-year old actress who plays the lead role, is a mischievous, impish waif, disguising herself as Zoro to intrigue the young man her heart throbs for, stealing her father's garden dwarf, resurrecting her concierge's long dead husband.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the film's director, says he had the idea while watching the explosion of joy at France's World Cup victory three years ago. The fabulous success of Amelie Poulain is a strong signal of the shift in French mood, away from the miserabilisme of the late 1990s.

Philippe Delerm's best-selling book, The First Mouthful of Beer and Other Minuscule Pleasures, is further evidence that France has espoused cheerfulness and optimism.

The public has taken a sharp turn against intellectuals, the elite and the establishment; also shown by municipal election results in March and disgruntlement at the Nice Treaty. The film is so popular that organisers of the Cannes Film Festival were shamed for having rejected it, and in the end had to stage an open-air viewing.

In the run-up to next year's presidential and legislative elections, the politicians are paying close attention. President Jacques Chirac held a private showing of Amelie Poulain at the Elysee to which he invited the film's director and actors. Claudie Ossard, the producer, claimed Mr Chirac was transformed from fatigue to top form when he saw it.

"I told him that if it put him in such a good mood, I'd leave the copy for him," Ms Ossard said. For his part, the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, let it be known that he saw Amelie Poulain in the cinema, like an ordinary Frenchman.

France's best-known literary critic, Bernard Pivot, calls Amelie Poulain "France's first secular saint". It must have been Amelie, he suggested in his column, who discreetly told Mr Jospin that he "ought to tell the truth to the French about you-know-what"; whereupon Mr Jospin confessed to his Trotskyist past in the National Assembly.

The film's locations in Montmartre have become scenes of pilgrimage. The fruit and vegetable stand in the rue des TroisFreres where Amelie defends a handicapped North African shop assistant against his bullying boss is the first stop.

Then tourists head for Les Deux-Moulins, the 1950s cafe where Amelie plays matchmaker to a hypochondriac cashier and a jealous, macho client. The cafe's owner, Claude Labbe, says he's not sure his establishment will enter legend, but "since the film came out, the flow of people coming to drink a beer or a cafe creme is unending".

But France would not be France without a few kill-joys. Serge Kaganski, an editor at Les Inrockuptibles, the French equivalent of Rolling Stone magazine, was verbally lynched after publishing a one-page opinion piece in Liberation denouncing the film's "particularly right-wing and reactionary vision of Paris, of France and the world". Kaganski compared Amelie Poulain to a plastic paper-weight enclosing a Paris monument in phoney snow.

The film was "sickening", a fitting video for a Jean-Marie Le Pen rally, he said.

At least one other Parisian appears impervious to the Amelie Poulain ethos of human warmth and generosity, the film's press attache, Isabelle Sauvanon. When I telephoned to ask for information, Ms Sauvanon snapped: "I don't have time for the foreign press," and hung up on your correspondent.