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August 10, 2003

Cinematography Meets Geography in Montmartre

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

HIS is the period of pilgrimage in Paris to familiar shrines like the Eiffel Tower (newly garlanded with 20,000 blinking lights) and the Louvre (with an annual summer amusement park in the Tuileries Garden next door). Then there are newer shrines, like a cafe and a greengrocer in the shadow of Montmartre, all because of a mischievous but do-good 23-year-old film heroine named Amélie Poulain.

"Amélie," a quirky low-budget film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, was nominated for five Oscars and has been seen by more than 25 million people since its release in 2001. In the film (released in France as "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain"), the title character, played by the French actress Audrey Tautou, is a good fairy who touches friends, family members and even strangers with her anonymous acts of generosity.

Now the spirit of the film has spread to a corner of Montmartre where the film is set. And the real-life places that she frequented have profited from her magic, creating a cult of Amélie, particularly among foreign tourists who seek to follow in her footsteps. The French call it the "Amélie Poulainization" of the neighborhood.

The magic seems to have spread even beyond Montmartre. In May, the designer Lancel introduced an Amélie line of whimsical clothing, handbags and shoes printed with maps of the landmarks of Paris, although a company spokesman insisted that there was no connection to the film and that the fabric pattern was taken from a greeting card from the 1950's. A canvas handbag trimmed in red leather sells for $354, a canvas grocery cart at $295 (prices at $1.18 to the euro), far more expensive than anything Amélie Poulain would have owned.

"The film was like a cloud of happiness on which everyone in the world would like to float," said Laure Morandina, the head of Montmartre's neighborhood association. "There are moments of the film that touched something universal and also captured the spirit of Montmartre as a village where even if the whole world visits us, we still know all the shopkeepers."

Amélie's world is not the Montmartre of the white-domed basilica of Sacré-Coeur and the instant portrait painters of the Place du Tertre nearby or the sex and strip shops of the Boulevard de Clichy.

This is the rapidly gentrifying but close-knit area of Abbesses, just up the road from the original Moulin Rouge nightclub. There is a a twice-monthly newspaper called La Gazette de Montmartre: The Voice of the Village that still reports on neighborhood events like births and weddings, business meetings and watercolor exhibitions.

The Café des Deux Moulins on the Rue Lepic where Amélie worked as a waitress has become one of the most frequented cafes in the neighborhood since the movie opened. When its longtime owner, Claude Labbé, announced he was selling it last year, there were rumors it would become an Amélie theme bar or even worse, a fast-food restaurant.

Indeed, Marc Fougedoire, the new owner, eliminated the classic cigarette stand, an important focal point in the film, to make room for more tables. Cloth tablecloths were replaced by paper.

But the copper-topped bar, mustard-colored ceiling, lace curtains and 1950's décor have been preserved, including the neon wall lamps. So has the unisex toilet that is the scene of a frenzied coupling between Georgette, a hypochondriac cigarette seller, and Joseph, a rough patron whose life is transformed by love. There are no glossy autographed photos of the stars of the film, no articles cut from newspapers, just posters of Amélie from the movie hanging on the front door and the back wall. Smoking is allowed; there is an area for nonsmokers.

Except for a Sunday brunch, the menu has mostly stayed the same, and includes a green salad with warm goat cheese, three pâtés "Deux Moulins," steak au poivre and pig's brains with lentils. The hamburger comes with an egg on top.

"It was really love at first sight," said Mr. Fougedoire of his decision to buy the cafe. "We were careful not to change anything except the cigarette stand, which annoyed the smokers and didn't look very authentic. We could have made it more 'Amélie,' but we wanted it to stay a real Parisian cafe."

Tourists and veterans compete for space, but not all are pleased.

"There's no tabac," lamented Shinobu Otsubo, a 23-year-old Japanese exchange student in Paris who has seen the film four times. "What a shame. It was the symbol of the film."

Others are entranced. "This is charm, this is magic," said Sebastien Metzger, a 19-year-old student from Stuttgart who had seen the movie several times and was following Amélie's route. "And it's all so simple and pure."

The cafe is now so chic that a 14-page fashion feature in the August issue of French Vogue was photographed there.

Ali Mdoughy, the Moroccan-born greengrocer whose store, Au Marché de la Butte on the Rue des Trois Frères, was a key site in the film, has left up the signpost from the film that renamed the store "Maison Collignon, founded in 1956." It was here that Amélie regularly bought her three hazelnuts and one fig.

Mr. Mdoughy, who has owned the store for 30 years, is quite different from the grocer in the film, a French bully who publicly humiliates his Algerian employee, the only non-Frenchman in the film. Mr. Mdoughy has turned over management of the store to Rachid Assab, his brother, and now runs a bakery down the street. He even thought - briefly - of naming it Amélie's Bakery, and creating a chocolate in her name.

The store is more upscale than the typical corner groceries that are usually run by Arab immigrants and stay open late on Sundays. Fruit is displayed in wicker baskets trimmed in plastic holly. A framed photograph of Amélie from the movie hangs in the window. Postcards of the grocery store sell for $1.15.

Mr. Mdoughy has created a Web site (www.epicerie-collignon.com) that features a map of "the path of Amélie" and has issued a CD called "Ali: L'Épicier de Montmartre," featuring old songs from Montmartre, Berber tunes with electro beats, as well as his personal musings about life and legumes. The CD was recorded largely in the grocery store, by a neighborhood musician who has been shopping there for 20 years.

"Amélie," Mr. Mdoughy said, "has changed my life."

The film was particularly popular in Japan, and there are tours led by Japanese tour guides; in January the Michelin guide Web site www.viamichelin.com published a two-hour itinerary of Amélie's world (it can be found in the archives). Among the must-see spots are the antique carousel in the Place St.-Pierre, where Amélie has a meeting with her future beau; the terraced garden leading up to Sacré-Coeur; and the Lamarck-Caulaincourt Métro station, where Amélie lends a hand to a blind man; and the Canal St.-Martin, in the 10th Arrondissement with its locks, iron bridges and new shops and cafes.

Part of the film's attraction, and part of what draws people to this neighborhood, is that it offers a nostalgic view of a Paris that no longer exists and perhaps never did. The film has been praised as charming and feel-good and criticized as saccharine, even fascistic. There is no graffiti or trash in the Métro. Indeed, in making his film, Mr. Jeunet unclogged the streets of too many cars, scrubbed graffiti off walls and used rose and golden lenses.

The Communist daily newspaper L'Humanité faulted the film for showing a Paris "cleaned of immigrants, a Paris well cleaned," adding, "It is not stated but everyone knows that the 'Fabulous Destiny' is a fascist film."

In any case, Mr. Jeunet was honored with the National Order of Merit by President Jacques Chirac, who called watching the film at the Élysée Palace "one of the best evenings of my life." In a speech shortly after the film opened, François Fillon, now France's labor and social affairs minister, urged France to become "softer," with more "tolerance, more fraternity, a bit like the France of Amélie Poulain."

The discovery of Amélie's world has also created some tension between neighborhood regulars and the outside invaders. Tattoo artists, fast-food joints and inexpensive clothing shops have replaced many longtime merchants. Real estate prices soared even higher after the film was made, and last year, the Villa Royale, a luxury hotel where rooms start at about $285, opened on the Rue Duperre near Place Pigalle.

It was seen as a victory for residents and merchants when the cheese merchant Michel Catherine retired and managed to sell his shop to another cheese merchant several months ago. But the fishmonger who used to cry, "Eat good fish and you will have beautiful children" is gone.

The one-time working-class neighborhood has become even more upscale than before. Rotisserie chickens turning on spits are sold at a neighborhood butcher shop as they are in the movie, for more than $16 each. Litchis from Madagascar and black truffles are available in the markets.

"Amélie Poulain made prices, especially real estate prices, skyrocket," said Annic Journet, as she dined on steak with braised endives in the Café des Deux Moulins, talking as if Amélie were a real person. "Prices were already going up, but the movie created even more buzzing about the neighborhood," added Ms. Journet, who has lived with her sister in the neighborhood for 25 years. "People took advantage of that buzzing to make great deals."

As for the changes in the cafe since the movie, "It used to be more like a village," she said. "There used to be more faces from the neighborhood. Rue Lepic. Rue Montmartre. Now it's tourists. Now we find the service is charming and they smile more. But we'll go somewhere else now."

Visitor Information

Café des Deux Moulins, 15, rue Lepic; (33-1) 42.54.90.50; Métro: Blanche. Classics like salade frisée aux lardons ($8.85, at $1.18 to the euro) and a demi-Camembert with a glass of Côtes du Rhône ($7).

Au Marché de la Butte, 56, rue des Trois Frères; (33-1) 42.64.86.30; Métro: Abbesses. Closed Monday. A traditional French neighborhood convenience store that still looks very much like the épicerie in the movie. The owner's CD is $24.

A ride on the carousel at the Place St.-Pierre is $2.50. Métro: Anvers. Open daily.

The scene in which Amélie throws stones into the Canal St.-Martin is in the 10th Arrondissement at the river lock at the corner of the Rue des Vinaigriers and the Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles.

ELAINE SCIOLINO is chief of the Paris bureau of The Times.

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posted by Beauxbeaux's Daddy at 8:13 AM