Let's see, the audience is smiling so they're obviously not watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Okay, brace yourself. I’m about to say something awfully uncritical:

There is nothing about this movie that I didn’t like.

Amelie is the story of a young French woman — appropriately named Amelie — living in the Montmartre section of Paris. A shy loner with a certain Audrey Hepburnishness about her, Amelie lives a life of whimsical interest in other people, but little actual engagement with them.

This changes the day she discovers a box hidden behind a loose tile in her bathroom. It’s a boy’s treasure box, full of toys and trinkets and small mementos, left by a long ago tenant. She decides to track down the owner and return the box to him, leading him to it and watching from a distance as he discovers it. The reminder of childhood joy and innocence moves the man to reconcile with his estranged son, and this in turn moves Amelie to dedicate her life to fixing other people’s.

Amelie was delighted with the Chia Pet she got for Christmas.

The ways in which she does this are the chief delight of the movie. Through a series of simple favors and complex schemes, Amelie moves the people in her life closer to their fondest wishes. She also does a hilarious job of making life miserable for an abrasive grocer. I would love to give you more details on her plots, which are great fun, but I don’t want to spoil anything for you. It’s best you experience them for yourself.

Along the way, she notices Nino, another idiosyncratic soul who haunts Paris train stations picking up discarded pictures outside of photo booths. Sensing a kindred spirit, Amelie tries to meet him, chickens out, sends him cryptic messages and clues, hides when he gets close, then starts the process again. This sweet-natured, near-courtship could grow annoying if it wasn’t played out so charmingly. Credit goes to the actors — Audrey Tautou as the winsome Amelie and Mathieu Kassovitz as Nino — who effectively portray the simultaneous longing for and fear of intimacy of the shy person. This is a likable couple and we root for them all the way.

"If only I could find a waif-like Parisian girl, my life would be complete."

But the real star of the show here is director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known, at least to me, for City of Lost Children — a movie which I can’t decide if it’s bleakly weird or weirdly bleak — and Alien Resurrection, which is just bleak. Oh, and boring. But after Amelie I’ll forgive him anything. The visual style is a perfect match for the story. Jeunet uses fantasy sequences, fast-motion, quick cuts, improbable camera angles and a variety of other techniques, always to ideal effect. My favorite moment was a beautiful shot of Amelie melting into a puddle of water after an aborted attempt to talk to Nino. How wonderful to see an elegant special effect used to illustrate a character’s emotional state.

As Amelie blossoms from a woman content to watch life to one making her first tentative attempts to live it, her friends, neighbors and the audience are better off for it. I can’t say it strongly enough: GO SEE THIS MOVIE! I defy you to leave the theater without a smile on your face.

Gorilla Pants rating: 4 out of 4 bananas