Jane Austen has had an incomparable affect on popular culture for over 200 years. The trope of two individuals who initially hate one another, regardless of highly effective attraction, owes an enormous debt to Satisfaction and Prejudice. Romantic comedies typically hinge on social or class ambitions, discovering compatibility, misunderstandings, or characters’ makes an attempt to intrude in others’ lives. Most viewers are conscious that Clueless is a free, ’90s highschool retelling of Emma. As Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Emma opened on February 21, I considered Emma’s much less apparent similarities to a different previous favourite: Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. Usually shortened to Amélie, this 2001 French romantic comedy stars Audrey Tautou as a younger Parisian lady in 1997, who tries to enhance strangers’ lives.
Each Emma and Amélie are younger girls of their early 20s who always meddle in others’ lives, even when this requires deception. They function matchmakers, typically to buddies who’re unaware of their plotting behind the scenes. Emma and Amélie act as intermediaries between potential couples, mendacity and telling one individual the opposite is interested in them. Drama ensues. Each tales finish with the protagonists discovering romances of their very own and realizing themselves significantly better.
Though these tales are set in several international locations and centuries, the protagonists’ household lives have so much in widespread, maybe coincidentally. Emma and Amélie are each socially remoted girls dwelling with hypochondriac, widower fathers. Emma has managed her household’s house since her older sister married and their mom died. She’s refined in some methods and immature in others. Emma’s father worries obsessively over his personal well being, whereas Amélie’s dad worries about Amélie’s. He mistakenly believes that his daughter has a coronary heart situation, so he decides to homeschool her.
I’m not the primary individual to look at parallels between Emma and Amélie. A member of the family talked about this concept to me when Amélie was lately in heavy rotation on HBO. Steven D. Greydanus at Decentfilms.com wrote: “Like Jane Austen’s Emma (and Valley-Woman knockoff Clueless), Amélie is a couple of younger lady, on this case a Parisienne waitress, who meddles furtively with different individuals’s hearts and lives whereas remaining oblivious to the wants of her personal coronary heart.” This quote sums up the quirky, ironic mixture of naïveté, maturity, and manipulation that Emma and Amélie share.
Regardless of their parallels, these two tales have vital variations in tone. Viewers typically describe Amélie as “whimsical.” Amélie is motivated by her often-misguided senses of altruism and romanticism. She’s not solely a matchmaker, however is, within the French narrator’s phrases, “an everyday do-gooder.” In contrast to Emma’s, Amélie’s plotting often works. She reunites estranged members of the family, returns childhood keepsakes, and helps a disabled employee get revenge on his abusive, ableist boss. In an effort to get her dad out of the home, she pretends that his backyard gnome is sending him postcards from all all over the world.
As a French film from the 2000s, Amélie is extra genuinely sex-positive than most American or British films from that point. It’s unimaginable to think about an Austen heroine questioning “what number of couples are having an orgasm proper now,” as Amélie does.
Class ID: 1372
Class ID: 471
Class ID: 1005
Class ID: 14292
Whereas Amélie idealizes its heroine, Jane Austen famously described Emma as “a heroine whom nobody however myself will very similar to.” Though Emma additionally has good intentions, she’s overconfident in her personal expertise as a matchmaker and believes that her good friend Harriet deserves to marry above her social station. Amélie, in distinction, doesn’t care about social standing within the first place. She flaunts social conventions: for instance, by ringing strangers’ doorbells uninvited.
Amélie isn’t precisely a retelling of Emma, but it surely has many parallels to Austen’s novel. I haven’t watched sufficient French movies to see the place Amélie matches within the canon. I’m undecided whether or not Emma influenced the filmmakers consciously, however each tales and their heroines are examples of the identical archetype. They’re each sheltered younger girls from comparable households who present a relatable mixture of maturity and naïveté. They presume to enhance—or meddle in—different individuals’s lives. Folks with the least expertise on a subject typically give probably the most assured recommendation. As Emma and Amélie achieve expertise in life and love, they study that each are unpredictable. The small print could change, however comparable tales of timeless experiences seem throughout cultures and centuries.
Extra on Emma
Why Emma is the Worst Jane Austen Novel
The Queerness of Emma
