The director Tonie Marshall saw Tautou come into the audition for that film. I needed the money." Then she was cast as a gauche beautician in Venus Beauty, which also starred one of the greats of French cinema, Nathalie Baye (who just played Patsy in a French film version of Absolutely Fabulous). "I started off in this dreadful, vulgar film called The Libertine. Because nobody could give me a good answer, I opted for acting." Until Amelie, she'd been quietly forging a film career in modest roles. "When I was a little girl, I loved monkeys," says Tautou, eyebrows in circumflex overdrive. Her father is a dental surgeon, her mother a teacher. She was born 24 years ago and raised in the small town of Montlucon, north of Paris. I hate it when you tread in a puddle and the water soaks your socks." Oh stop, Tautou, stop, stop. What are her likes and dislikes? "I like the light that comes off metal shutters at siesta time in the summer, having a break from driving in the shops at motorway services, the odour of petrol at petrol stations, rolling down little slopes. Such pigeonholing at the start of a career seems ill-advised. Unfortunately, she now seems to be rather stuck in that rut: in her new film, God Is Big But I Am Small, she plays it coy, wee and cutesy. She's shy, charming, modest, with just enough wickedness to keep her interesting, just like her character in the film. She slipped under the skin of Amelie and found it a perfect fit. You expect that in the last reel she'll change her wardrobe and emerge in a drop-dead frock to cries of: "You're beautiful!" It doesn't quite end that way, but even hard-faced French matrons and their sour, Napoleonic spouses have been leaving cinemas with tears in their eyes and warm glows in their hearts.īut the tears and warm glows have been chiefly caused by Tautou. She wears sensible cardigans, long skirts and shoes that are clumpier than Doc Martens. People think she's backward she knows she's romantically inept. Dislikes: the injustice of little people sucking on the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Likes: breaking the skin of crème brlée with the back of her spoon, easing her hands into great sacks of lentils, skimming stones on the Canal Saint Martin. During the film, she lists her likes and dislikes. Set in 1997, just after the death of Princess Diana, it is steeped in sentiment for a France fast disappearing, teems with a cast of putatively lovable eccentrics, and is larded with the clever special effects that recall Jeunet's 1991 feature film debut Delicatessen.Īmelie is set up as an appealingly quirky character. The last time all France was captivated at the cinema in this way was when Robert Carlyle stripped to the buff in The Full Monty.īut Amelie is different. It saw off Pearl Harbor and became one of those rare films that everybody - young and old, dim and bright, provincial and Parisian - has been queueing up to see. The movie has been the French box office hit of the year. In French, the movie has the lovely rhyming title Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, translated into English simply as Amelie. The dark eyes, the pageboy haircut and the impish smile of Tautou. Today in Paris you can't turn a corner without those dark eyes confronting you from another poster - the one for Jeunet's film. After 10 seconds, I knew she was the one." I set up a meeting and she tried for the part. "I was struck by a pair of dark eyes, a flash of innocence, an unusual demeanour. What was he going to do? Jeunet turned a street corner and looked at a poster for a film called Venus Beauty. He'd just got home from directing Alien Resurrection in the US and now wanted to make a small, romantic film set in Montmartre about a diffident Parisian waitress.īut his lead, British actress Emily Watson, had just quit. One day a couple of years ago, film director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was wandering through Paris wondering how he could save his new picture. It's the eyes, though, that are Tautou's fortune. True, she has the underwhelming handshake of a tranquillised lemur, but, hey, that's French girls for you. Tautou has a porcelain fragility, a cutesy upturned nose, and lips that, while they may not be Emanuelle Béart's, still have a Gallic pout to them.
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