Mise-en Scene of Confinement in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 French film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain is an innovative cinema-narrative experiment. Jeunet cross-employs conventions from genres other than melodrama such as an almost documentary style expository voice-over, and a meta-cinematic technique whereby the character visually acknowledges the camera. Equally innovative is Jeunet’s use of mise-en-scene, particularly in the scene between time signatures 27:43 and 30:30. Jeunet uses such techniques as contrast, setting, props, lighting, and framing to create an environment that is increasingly confined in both space and motion, and that draws Amelie towards the inevitable anagnorisis that she must escape such an insular existence.
The scene opens as Amelie ascends the winding and somewhat labyrinthine stairwell of her Parisien apartment complex. As she moves up the stairwell, she is interrupted by the voice of another tenant, Raymond Dufayel, in the doorway of his apartment on the landing below her. On his invitation, Amelie moves out of the more spacious stairwell into the confines of his apartment.
Upon entering his apartment, Amelie is drawn into an increasingly confined space. The lighting is dingy and yellow. In stark contrast to the empty stairwell, the apartment is noticeably cluttered and littered with myriad eclectic set pieces. In this environment, Amelie is initially framed in the uncomfortably narrow passage of Dufayel’s front hallway. She gingerly creeps into his main room in which archaic set pieces and his geriatric presence create a sense of decay. The suffocating and dungeon-like space seems to close in around her. As Dufayel discusses his painting collection, Amelie is visually drawn into the even more confined space of his even more cluttered closet. Rear shots of the two characters with the limited space of the closet between them are framed to exclude any external space creating the visual illusion that Amelie might be swept into this closet with no other space in which to escape.
Dufayel’s Renoir copies are the conversational focus of the scene in which Amelie is likened to “the girl with the glass of water” (Jeunet). As Amelie holds a glass of red liquid, the same colour as the liquid in the glass of the girl in the painting, she is centred in the rear of the shot between Dufayel and his canvas. Amelie’s face appears brightly painted with makeup compared to the grizzled face of the aged man. As a representation of Amelie, the painted girl is a clear metaphor. Dufayel explains that he has been painting the same image annually for years. He describes the difficulty he has had capturing the enigma of the “girl with the glass of water” (Jeunet). The girl in the painting is fossilized in endless iterations of the same enigma, never in motion, separated from the rest of the characters in the painting, and then locked in Dufayel’s closet. The similarity between Amelie and the girl in the painting highlights the notion that she runs the risk of becoming the girl in the painting – an inanimate enigma locked in a closet in endless iterations of the same futile and meaningless existence. The entire mise-en-scene of the scene is replete with representations that threaten to entomb Amelie in the confined space.
Amelie’s moment of realization comes when her enclosed proximity to Dufayel is at its most intimate and it almost appears that he might well physically absorb her into his isolation and decay. She flees his apartment with what dramatically appears to be a new outlook. Indeed much of the rest of the film concerns itself with how Amelie escapes from her fossilizing pattern through romantic intrigues. Jeunet incorporates elements of lighting, setting, and props into a symbolic and metaphoric environment to artistically complete this narrative outcome. All elements of the mise-en-scene support the theme of the larger narrative in which Amelie must break free from the solitude of her own past and shyness, from the confines of her Dufayel-like apartment, and from a Dufayel-like destiny of isolation, loneliness, and futile repetition in order to realize her romantic aspirations.



Works Cited
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, dir. La Fabuleaux Destin, d’Amelie Poulain. UGC; Miramax, 2001. DVD.