In the plethora of reds and greens that make up Amelie’s colour palette, orange is worthy of special consideration. No part of the film is left untouched. It may, then, seem counterintuitive to look upon orange as the exemption to the film’s digital colourisation. There is a scholarly agreement that colour is ambivalent, or regarded with suspicion by a knowing audience (Julia Kristeva, David Batchelor). Paul Coates suggests it may have psychological universality, if not cultural. Amelie ponders to both options- we may see Paris through rose (sepia) tinted glasses, a widespread and perhaps unfair critique of the film, or choose to believe in what is clearly fabricated. Maybe Amelie doesn’t even realise her colour bias. We advocate the last option, requiring a child-like perspective for a fuller appreciation of orange in the film.
Wherever Amelie is, she contrasts with the predominant reds and greens of her environment. Sitting by a neighbour’s bedside in a pastel orange cardigan, Amelie grins as the comatose woman rises and affirms the fantasy of making up for lost sleep. This is also what she wears photographing animal-shaped clouds. However, during home schooling with her mother the cardigan is hospital green. To this impressionable child, red with green signalled either tragedy (Amandine’s death) or mistreatment (a neighbour convincing her of responsibility for a car collision). Hence, she dresses in red or green as a woman, excluding a pearly nightgown worn in her apartment that is debatable as peach. Amelie therefore consciously decorates her apartment in warm-toned gold and amber to counter the artificial green of the metro station and grey Montmartre streets. The apartment is a manifestation of orange’s comforting properties. As will be discussed with A Little Princess, a child’s bedtime is also tied to material elements like fire and warmth, giving the colour physical attributes.
Amelie’s relationship to orange is also subconscious, her encounters with other Parisians reflective of that warm ‘orange’ mindset. She discovers Bretodeau’s box in a creamy, off-white bathroom and is inspired to return it. Watching housebound Dufayel eat alone, Amelie surveys her pale-yellow kitchen and feels that mutual loneliness. However, there are hints of literal orange that require us to be like Amelie watching a film and look more closely. The eccentric Madeline is dressed almost completely in orange when she invites Amelie into her apartment, extended to the floor lamp, tablecloth and various trinkets. Orange string lights glimmer behind her on the wall as she is ‘lit up’ by Amelie’s forged letter. Amelie also brings her orange interiority into the exterior world, through the Café des 2 Moulin’s strip lighting, peering through windows or surveying Paris from a rooftop- all controlled social encounters. Occasionally, her aura is replaced by the blue cinema light or a stealthy black/burgundy masquerade as she leaves clues across the city. However, in scenes where she relates to others through her imagination, there is always warmth. The opening credits see Amelie playing with red fruit against a green wallpapered background, but the yellow undertone is carried throughout the film. It gives clinical incidents sentimentality, like Amelie’s father listening to her heartbeat. In the film’s conclusion, orange unites Amelie’s childhood longing for affection with romance. A naked Amelie cradles Nino’s hair, their exposed skin imbuing the colour with a new sensuality. Their moped ride even reads like another film, thanks to its sepia vintage look. Orange supports Amelie’s happy ending.
In line with film theorists, colour refuses to be fixed to objects. The mise-en-scene and Amelie’s perspective become inseparable under an ‘orange’ filter, existing separately from the red and green monotony. Amelie reveals her secrets through breaking the fourth wall, even when that relates to adult experiences of sex and existential crises. Sometimes, we are no longer spectators but diegetic objects. Seeing her ‘future’ on television, Amelie holds an orange cushion to her chest as we- the television- look back. Reassembling Madeline’s letters, Amelie stares into the camera to placate us within that room. Compared to a traditional vantage point, our perspective is more orange. A yellow bathroom marries us into Amelie’s world; she doesn’t look directly into the camera here per se but retreats into the bathroom, leading to the box’s discovery. When Amelie is unaware of our presence, like the fast-forward montage of her travelling across the city or walking peacefully in slow motion, the palette returns to red and green. When the orange theme is broken, that changes our intimate relationship with Amelie. Coates states that black and white moments within a coloured mise-en-scene are most reflective of “unresolved tension” (2010, pp.13-14). Although he means tension between the object and its colour as independent, other films have used this to dramatize ideological conflicts. Take The Grand Budapest Hotel, when the monotonous death squad interrupt the optimistic pink and purple colour theme. Speaking to her through the television, a black and white Dufayel urges Amelie to find love. This has been the tension beneath her generosity.
Jeunet faced controversy for romanticizing Paris and ‘white washing’ it’s actual ethnic diversity. Hiding all traces of litter, graffiti or social housing, this is understandable, but to focus purely on the lack of realism undermines the significance of individual colours. Other films we have explored use orange to represent class differences (like Parasite). Amelie’s orange hue is undiscriminating. The narrator attributes her sense of peace to a “soft light” and “quiet murmur of the city”. She guides a blind pedestrian through the market with every sense but sight, like the aroma of patisseries and heat of roasting chickens. All take place against a backdrop of mustard yellow/orange. Reaching the green station, their shared orange experience must end. Orange also combines rural and metropolitan life as it would be understood by a child born in the period of Amelie’s release. Instead of reading the film as a nostalgic memory (Holm, 2015) that the millennial generation wouldn’t have experienced, perhaps Amelie forms a new, valid time. Familiar domestic rituals- like a child’s bedtime- still stand outside of digital colour enhancement. The grown-up Amelie often dines with her father, late afternoon sun streaming through the kitchen window. In one meeting, he is even clad in an orange pullover and she an orange polka-dot blouse. This colour, for Amelie alone, grounds her to her upbringing. The film may be too sentimental and ‘showy’, as Dudley Andrew puts it. He criticises its pseudo–New Wave style, unable to resist the “facile feeling…when Paris is discovered through the eyes of a disingenuous child or adolescent” (2004, p.37). But Amelie’s discovery was never of Paris, because it was already familiar. Neither did Jeunet wish for us to consider this version of Paris a possibility. As we already established in the beginning of this article, colour refuses stability. Orange is instead a halfway point between reality and fantasy, subject to change in Amelie’s imagination and, by taking her perspective in the film, ours. Even without the ‘cinema du look’ aesthetic- a style Amelie undeniably is- orange would still have this power.
The current essay is a three part essay, continued on the following links:
Orange as Childhood Perspective Part 2
Orange as Childhood Perspective Part 3
References
Andrew, D., 2004. Amelie, or Le Fabuleux Destin du Cinema Francais. Film Quarterly, 57(3), pp.34-46.
Coates, P., 2010. Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holm, J., 2015. Consuming Nostalgia in “Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain”. The French Review, 89(1).
