Jump to content

Home

Amélie's Paris: a virtual postcard tour


Recommended Posts

10amelie.span.jpg

Audrey Tautou and Mathieu Kassovitz in the Café des Deux Moulins in "Amélie."

 

Cinematography Meets Geography in Montmartre

 

This is the period of pilgrimage in Paris to familiar shrines like the Eiffel Tower (newly garlanded with 20,000 blinking lights) and the Louvre (with an annual summer amusement park in the Tuileries Garden next door). Then there are newer shrines, like a cafe and a greengrocer in the shadow of Montmartre, all because of a mischievous but do-good 23-year-old film heroine named Amélie Poulain.

 

....Now the spirit of the film has spread to a corner of Montmartre where the film is set. And the real-life places that she frequented have profited from her magic, creating a cult of Amélie, particularly among foreign tourists who seek to follow in her footsteps. The French call it the "Amélie Poulainization" of the neighborhood.

 

...."The film was like a cloud of happiness on which everyone in the world would like to float," said Laure Morandina, the head of Montmartre's neighborhood association. "There are moments of the film that touched something universal and also captured the spirit of Montmartre as a village where even if the whole world visits us, we still know all the shopkeepers."

 

Full article, The New York Times, free registration required

 

This story is accompanied by an audio slideshow narrated by Elaine Sciolino for the NYT.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...