Amélie finds beauty in witnessing the way objects impact people. She is fascinated by the pieces we leave behind and disregard, and how these objects discreetly influence us. She consistently disrupts people’s mundane routines by removing and then returning objects, which makes the object seem more powerful and mysterious. People only become aware of their reliance on things when those things are gone, so by taking and then returning these objects, Amélie rearranges the person’s relationship and understanding of that item. In doing so, Amélie changes their perspective and assumptions about life. For instance, when she steals her father’s garden gnome, she sends it on a trip with a friend, and then finally returns it to her father. She could have just hidden in cupboard, but instead, she plots this miraculous journey just so he can see the object in a different light.
It is important to note that although Amélie influences multiple people in the film, she does so quietly, without anyone noticing that she is responsible. As a result, it seems like these objects have a mind of their own, and that they left by themselves because they were so neglected. It is only when the person notices that they are gone, and misses them, that they suddenly return. Through a simple act of disruption, Amélie brings objects to life, and similarly breaks their owners out of their toxic routines.
The only way Amélie can successfully remove objects and rearrange is by becoming an object. She fades into the background of these scenes, watching but never interacting. This allows her subjects to project onto her, as they do with their objects. Just as she imagines the lives of these objects, and the memories associated with them, so too do people imagine what she is like. It means that she is capable of everything and nothing to the casual observer, as they can imagine any sort of life they like for her. At the same time, Amélie struggles with this object state during the film, as she is afraid to draw direct attention to herself and thus create a specific version of her life. She could no longer be an object, with limitless potential, if she let someone into her life. Although she eventually reconciles her identity with this objectivity, the film similarly focuses on how the little things quietly influence us, whether it be small objects or the ever-quiet Amélie.
Disruption
There are two types of disruption in the film: vengeful and nostalgic. Both versions remind people of things, but do so in different ways, and with a different intent. For instance, Amélie decides to punish her neighbor, the grocer, by sneaking into his apartment and slightly adjusting everything. She changes the velocity of the lightbulbs, his slipper size, his alarm clock, and even switches his toothpaste with his foot ointment. Although Amélie only changes a few little things, it’s enough to utterly disrupt the neighbor’s routine and disorient him. She doesn’t radically change his environment, it still looks familiar, but that familiarity is misleading.
Her move relies on his expectations of the objects in his world, specifically his expectation that they are lifeless. It seems to the manager that his world is actively working against him, that the objects are conspiring. This might be untrue, but Amélie’s disruption still changes his behavior and perspective on objects.
The neighbor is just one of a few people Amélie reeks quiet vengeance on. In a flashback, we learn how young Amélie sat on a neighbor’s roof with a radio so she could cut out his TV whenever a soccer team was about to score. She did so because the neighbor had convinced her that she was responsible for a car crash, letting her believe that she had caused a series of devastating accidents all by taking photos. Although Amélie later realizes that the neighbor was just a terrible person, hence the TV vengeance, his warning stays with her. She becomes obsessed by the way objects impact and quietly manipulate our world, just as her camera seemingly impacted the car. Deep down, she understands that ultimately people project emotions onto objects, like her terror at taking photographs, but she ignores this logic. She wants to return people to a similar state of terror, or disruption. By doing so, Amélie has the power to restore our relationship with objects, and to suggest that these relationships are not one-sided. Our actions have consequences, not just to the people around us, but also to our objects and the people we treat as objects. Amélie punished the grocer because he was cruel to his assistant and treated him like an inefficient object. Likewise, her childhood neighbor used her for his own amusement. In both cases, the evil doers were those who thought of people like objects, and so Amélie’s punishment challenged this dynamic.
Objects and Memory
Amélie also disrupts objects to return people to their childhood innocence, a place where the world was smaller, and relationships less complex. My favourite example of this is the scene where Amélie returns a box of long-lost memories to the man who grew up in her apartment.
Finding the hidden box is monumental for Amélie, as it is the first time an object seemingly moved without her influence. Prior to this scene, Amélie has moved objects for other people, and made it seem like the objects moved themselves. But now, it seems like an object has come to her and asked for help. It also arrives through bizarre circumstances, similar to those Amélie uses on other people. She finds it after her nighttime routine is disrupted by the TV, just as she once disrupted someone using a TV. When she hears about Princess Diana’s death on the news, Amélie drops the top of a bottle and leans down to pick it up, only to discover a loose tile and a small hole in the wall. Both the bottle topper and tile seemingly moved on their own, which means that the box is special not just for what it contains, but for how it arrived.
Amélie decides to find the owner of the box, and when she does, she sets up the perfect reunion. An empty phone booth, a silent caller, and on the shelf, a misplaced and forgotten treasure. The camera work is especially incredible in this scene, as the phone disappears out of frame once the man spots the box. Like the man, the camera has forgotten about the phone, and is now solely interested in the box. When the man remembers each of these objects and their role in his childhood, his flashback is shown in black and white to illustrate that it is outside of Amélie’s hyper stylized world, it is of a different time, and to suggest that the young boy once saw the world in black and white. Like his relationship to these objects, his life was simpler, or rather, more focused. There was less of a world when he was a child, which meant he paid more attention to objects.
We see the man’s worst day, the day when his perspective on objects changed forever. After winning at marbles, the man desperately tries to shove hundreds of marbles into his pockets. He ignores his teacher, and the stress on his coat, until his pockets eventually rip, and the marbles spill out. The narration notes that this was the man’s worst memory, although the man later admits that he no longer has a relationship with his daughter. One would think that losing his daughter would be a worse memory than just losing some marbles, but the marble scene has a symbolic role. His selfishness and hoarding led to his downfall, which could be a metaphor for his familial relationships, as losing the marbles could be a symbol for losing his daughter. In both cases, the man forgot about how objects influence and teach us, rather than how we influence objects. It never occurred to him that the object might reject him, that the marbles would rip away from him. But they did, as did his daughter, and he suffered because of that.
If losing marbles was his worst day, having objects returned must be his greatest day. This reunion between object and subject also suggests that the man will return to his daughter with a new perspective. Amélie didn’t just change the man’s relationship with an object, she changed his relationships in general.
Objects and Life
Later in the scene, the emotional man enters a café and sits beside Amélie at the bar. While talking with the servers, he mentions that something incredible has happened, and how funny time is. When he was a child, time seemed to drag, but now it goes by too quickly, which is strange because the flashback memories were sped up. This contrast between the man and the flashback implies that the memories we just saw are not his. We never hear his perspective in the scene, and right after the flashback montage, the camera cuts to Amélie as the man enters. The fact that we move to her instead of him implies that what we saw was all in Amélie’s head. It was what she imagined his childhood was like, her attempt to contextualize the objects she worked so long to return.
This explains why Amélie refuses to talk to the man during the scene, as she doesn’t want to know if she was wrong. She wants to keep the man at a distance to keep her story of him alive. To her, he is another displaced object, just like his box. That is not a bad thing, or even a problematic thing, she thinks very highly of objects and wants them to contain unprecedented life.
While the server makes fun of the man’s mysterious phone call, noting that the microwave is now ‘mysteriously’ calling to him, Amélie fully believes that objects have this kind of agency. The box called to her, so why can’t other objects? She might have made the phone call, but the man doesn’t know that. As such, her relationship to the object (the phone) is just an extension of the other object (the box).
The scene ends with the man talking at Amélie about life. He notes, “It’s time I look them up [his daughter and grandson], before I’m in a box myself”, with the box symbolizing both a coffin and being stuck in your ways. Amélie faces a similar issue, as she is afraid to leave her object status and open herself to a relationship with another person, not just an object. She is afraid to define herself, which is kind of funny because she has spent the entire film defining herself to the viewer. We met her family, we know her hobbies, we know the way she thinks about herself. Her simultaneous fear and interest of Nino, the man she falls in love with from a distance, centers on this dilemma. She is afraid to open herself to a new definition which is not reliant on how she treats the objects in her world. By getting to know Nino, he would no longer be an interesting object, but a real person. This would completely change her world view, and ultimately that is what she decides to do. Her victory at the end of the film is not just her new love, but her ability to love a person as a person, and not as an object.