Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fantastical romantic comedy made a star of Audrey Tautou and its distinctive visuals influenced a decade’s worth of film-makers

There’s a defining moment early in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie when Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), a painfully shy and uncommonly adorable waitress at the Two Windmills cafe in Montmartre, arranges the return of childhood treasures to a middle-aged man who’d hidden them in her apartment building 40 years earlier. She has gone through an exhaustive search to find this man, meeting all manner of eccentric Parisians along the way, but she eventually summons the right person to a phone booth and watches the tears roll down his cheeks as this tin full of trinkets unleashes a flood of memories.

As she glides blissfully through the frame, the narrator says, “Amélie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It’s a perfect moment. A soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. A surge of love, an urge to help mankind overcomes her.”