Cause and Effect in Amelie - Movie Review Example

Cause and Effect in Amlie In the movie Amlie, the character decided to be a causative agent to those around her as opposed to persisting in thewallflower persona that she had lived for most of her life. Encouraging her father to travel around the world, playing tricks upon the cruel grocer, and setting the jilted lover up with the hypochondriac tobacconist are just a few of the acts that she performed throughout the movie. Some of her deeds were positive in nature, while some of her deeds had negative outcomes, but what they all had in common was that Amlie was the character that pushed the actions of the characters forward. The theme of cause and effect is established early on in the movie. Amlie’s father had never traveled the world, and she encouraged him to. The reason for this was set up in the opening scenes that told the audience about Amlie’s childhood. Amlie’s father thought that she had a heart defect. The reason for this was that he was a rather secluded man, and the only time that Amlie received anything approaching physical attention was when her father gave her a medical exam. This being so, Amlie’s heart sped up due to the infrequent closeness with another person, and this made her father think that she had a weak heart. Without realizing it, Amlie’s father caused himself to never travel, as he thought Amlie’s weak heart wouldn’t permit them too. The final effect of Amlie’s plan was to get her father to finally travel abroad. The way that Amlie went about causing this to happen began by her stealing the garden gnome that her father had just recently added to the shrine he had built for his deceased wife. She then had a flight attendant friend take the gnome all over the world with her as she flew and had the flight attendant friend take pictures of the gnome at various famous locations around the world, such as at the Kremlin. She then visited her father, and once he showed her the pictures, she suggested that perhaps the gnome just wanted to see the world, and perhaps he should too. After receiving numerous pictures and finally receiving the gnome, at the end of the movie it shows Amlie’s father packing bags and taking a taxi to the airport. Her gnome stunt caused her father to realize that he should see the world. While the theme was set up early on, Amlie didn’t actually decide to take such an active role in the lives of others until she happened upon a little box that held the childhood belongings of a man that lived in her apartment years before her. Bretodeau, the man that lived in her apartment years before, finally decided to reunite with his daughter and grandson after years apart upon receiving the box from Amlie. The way in which Amlie caused this to happen was once finding the man after a long search, she left the box in a telephone booth and called that particular telephone booth as he walked by it. Answering the phone and finding no one on the line, Bretodeau looked down and saw the box. Not immediately recognizing it, he opened the box and saw the contents. Once he saw the items, he immediately recognized his childhood belongings, and they brought many memories back. Talking to Amlie in a bar and not realizing that she was the one that returned the box to him, he tells her that it seemed not that long ago really when he originally had the box, and that times flies by quickly. It reminded him that there was only so much time that people had in there lives, and that he should make the most of the time that he had. His grandson that he never met would have been about the age that he was when he had the box, and he figured that it was about time to reconcile with his daughter and become a part of his grandson’s life. This was the final effect that Amlie’s actions had upon Bretodeau, and this had a much larger impact on the stranger than she ever could have guessed in the first place. Seeing how this one act changed the life of a stranger for the better, Amlie then decided to make a concerted effort to do the same for other people around her. One of these people was her neighbor Madeleine Wells. Amlie helped Madeleine get over her dead husband that had abandoned her years earlier. The husband had run off with his secretary and had died in an accident while in South America. The way that Amlie helped her get over her husband’s abandonment was to make her think that she had received a letter from him years late that stated that he was on his way back to her and had always loved her. Amlie took love letters Madeleine’s husband had written to her while in the army and copied them. She then cut and pasted the copies into a forged letter stating that he was returning to Madeleine and that abandoning her was the biggest mistake of his life. As the final touch, Amlie aged the letter and then had it delivered as though it had gotten lost in the mail for decades and was now finally getting delivered. This letter was just what Madeleine needed to be able to live the rest of her life at peace. It might not have been honest, but it was what the poor, old widow needed to hear. Not all of Amlie’s actions had positive effects or ended the way that she might have pictured them. Collignon was the local grocer, and he was a particularly mean and spiteful man, especially to his assistant Lucien. The final effect made Collignon think he was going crazy and gave Lucien some relief from the constant belittlement as Collignon couldn’t stay awake during his shifts and slept out in the cauliflowers. She accomplished this by making a copy of Collignon’s key which he left in his keyhole and entered his apartment with the intention of playing tricks on him. She switched his tooth paste with his foot cream, switched out slippers that were too small for him, changed his alarm on his clock to go off at 4 A.M., rigged his lamp to blow up, and reset all of his speed dial numbers to ring up to psychiatric help lines. Amlie did not have good intentions for Collignon, but she did for the trio of Gina, Georgette, and Joseph. While she might have meant to solve their problems, Amlie only ended up making the situation more complicated for the three of them. As Joseph was a scorned lover of Gina, Amlie thought she might get Joseph off of Gina’s back by distracting him with Georgette, who could use a little distraction from her own problems stemming from her hypochondria. Amlie did succeed in interesting both Joseph and Georgette in each other, but she did not foresee Joseph treating Georgette in the same overly jealous manner that drove Gina away. Not only that, once he had driven Georgette away, Joseph continued to harass Gina. Perhaps what the movie was saying was that sometimes it is best to leave people to their own business, or that even the best laid plans sometimes backfire. After helping as many people as she did, it was time for Amlie to find a little happiness of her own. It could be said that she ended up being the cause of her own happiness. As she went about trying to perform all of these acts unnoticed, the shut-in Dufayel noticed her actions. As she was too introspective/introverted to take the proper actions to meet the man she was interested in, Dufayel encouraged her to go after him. As her good deeds caught the notice of Dufayel, and Dufayel in turn thought she should go after her own happiness and encouraged her to do so, her good deeds ended up coming back around to her in the form of the encouragement that inspired her to go after the man that she was interested in. This could be said to be the final message of the movie, that if you cause enough positive effects in the lives of those around, those positive actions will come back around to you and enrich your won life as a final effect. Read More