Breaking All the Rules

Breaking All the Rules

Genres can be viewed as two things, an indicator of what to expect from a film, or a metaphorical barrier that segregates a film into a category and being viewed only as that. A primary example of this is from the film Get Out by Jordan Peele, the movie has all the elements of a horror movie but has been labeled as a comedy for award season this year. One thing that makes a film brilliant is the genre category it has been placed into, a movie with a weak story is likely to do better in the genre of comedy than in the drama category. Most moviegoers are likely to choose a film that is distributed by a large production company, features well known actors, and does not require much thought (action movies). The best example is the production company A24, their movies are often thought-provoking, well written, and well received by critics, but most people ignore them in favor of films that lack any form of originality. However, there has been one film that has managed to break through the barriers of genre segregation, a French film called Amélie.

Throughout the history of film, there have been moments that have caused people to scratch their heads in confusion, wondering what they had just watched. Movies like Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception left people wondering what was real and what was fantasy. In 2001, French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet introduced the world to Amélie, a film about love, loss, innocence, and achieving happiness. The film follows the day-to-day life of the titular character as she meddles in the lives of the colorful characters she meets throughout the movie. While this concept sounds generic and rather familiar, it is how the film manages to make a concept that has been overused seem new and fresh. What makes Amélie so original and fresh is its own inability to figure out what movie it wants to be.

The way I like to view films is how they manage to mirror real-world issues and societal expectations. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 masterpiece Amélie is known for its beautiful cinematography, writing, and inability to select what genre it wants to be. In order to answer the latter, we need to look at Amélie’s real-world counterpart, society’s desire to place labels on each other and segregate each other into separate social cliques. What Amélie manages to do differently, is that it manages to reignite the idea of freedom of expression through a form of media that many people use. Similar to the protests of the Vietnam war in the 60s along with the counterculture movement, Amélie acts as a form of peaceful protest against the barriers of genre segregation that the movie industry is so adamant about.

When a film shifts its tone throughout the film frequently, it can become rather tedious and predictable, but how Amélie approaches this is what makes the film so unique. What Amélie does differently than other films that juggle multiple genres is that it never bites off more than it can chew. When a new genre is introduced in the middle of the movie, it is reused later in the film, instead of abandoned in an effort to see how many genres a director can fit into a single film. Similar to someone with ADHD who is under the suppression of a stimulant, Amélie manages to act as a metaphorical message to those who suffer from ADHD that just because you are different, doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. Therefore, the best way to look at a film’s genre is to look at it as you would a person, you don’t try to change them, you accept their preferences.