20 years have passed of ‘Amelie’, one of the most hated and loved films by the public. His vision does not admit a middle ground. Either you love it or you would condemn it to eternal fire and all its followers. ‘Amelie’ stands out for many things, such as the script and the music, but Bruno Delbonnel’s photography is what marked us all.
It’s a movie that I like, I can’t deny it. The truth is that it has given me vertigo to realize that it has been 20 years since I saw her for the first time. I went to the cinema because the director’s universe enchanted me since I discovered ‘Delicatessen’ (1991). And I wanted to see more after ‘The city of lost children’ (1995) and ‘Alien resurreccion’ (1997).
The proposal hooked me from the first frame. The script can raise certain misgivings about the innocence of the proposal. But each frame is a masterpiece of composition and color. The work of the cinematographer is irreproachable shot by shot.
And that is what we are going to analyze. In a certain way his work is reminiscent of the way of working of Vittorio Storaro, the Italian master who used color to understand the evolution of the characters.
The magic of ‘Amelie’ photography
‘Amelie’ is the story of a woman who, after a fortuitous event – finding a hidden box of a child at the time the death of Lady Di is reported – decides to dedicate her life to doing good for others. The problem is, like all of us, you have to try to fix your life first.
Throughout the entire footage, photography is very presentBecause as a child she has a camera that she thinks causes accidents. And the love of his life is a convulsive collector of lost photo booth images. And a garden gnome appears who travels around the world with a Polaroid to tell of his journey.
But the direction of photography is a marvel and it is the one that manages to take us by the hand shot after shot. A teacher once told us that each frame in the film is a work of art on its own..
Director of Photography Bruno Delbonnel gained fame and notoriety with this work. That’s how I came to Hollywood to work with the Coen brothers (‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’) or Tim Burton himself on ‘Big Eyes’ or ‘Dark Shadows’.
Color is the absolute protagonist. The color palette, based on reds and greens (two complementary in the chromatic circle), comes from a technique that was used a lot in the days of the reels, which was to develop the slides with the chemicals of the color negatives.
Also, like Storaro, uses what these colors express to guide the viewer. Hope, joy and passion are expressed thanks to the tones chosen at each moment.
The whole film stands out for the use of soft light, thanks to the great diffusion of the huge spotlights that it used to achieve that soft contrast in which the characters seem to radiate luminosity, especially the protagonist
The frames of ‘Amelie’
In addition, we have to assess the framing of each of the scenes. Thanks to the handling of the camera by the cinematographer, the story lives despite the two-hour duration. Camera movements, eye-catching framing, and symmetrical games help us fixate on the narrative over and over again.
As we can see in this video, symmetry is present at all times, from when the camera is fixed on the face of a character to the moments in which a traveling. If you like movies, surely this way of choosing the shots reminds you of one of the most important directors in history: Stanley Kubrick.
Indeed, Stanley Kubrick, a great photographer too, left the symmetrical shots as his hallmark to combine the narrative of the story with the visual power of the cinema. And it is a way of looking that is present in ‘Amelie’ and in all of Wes Anderson’s cinema, to take a more current example.
A lot of people can’t stand this movie. But surely if they try to forget about history and focus on each of the moments from the photographic point of view, they will discover another way of seeing it. And it sure changes your perception. It’s been 20 years, it sure deserves a chance. What do you think?