French Cinema Essay

French Cinema Essay

“Jeunet’s Post-Modern style creates a unique experience for his audience”. Discuss with close reference to Amélie and Delicatessen.

Jeunet’s films take the audience on a bizarre ride, to places they have never been. Two of Jeunet’s films, Amélie and Delicatessen are completely different but both create a unique experience for the audience and are, in some ways, distinctively similar. In both Amélie and Delicatessen, Jeunet uses colour, characters and themes to bring the story together and to deliver a production that the audience would never expect.

Jeunet uses colour very creatively in his films. Just by adjusting the colouring, he can make the audience see differences in small things and make them sense changes in emotions. In Amélie, Jeunet uses colour change to show when Amélie moves from childhood to adulthood. The colours change from sepia tones to lighter, real colours. This suggests that Amélie is moving from a safe, secure childhood, to the real world that is full of dangers. Jeunet also uses sepia saturation to help convey connotations of the past. The warm colours suggest a nostalgic, safer world.

Jeunet also uses sepia saturation in his film Delicatessen, although, this time he uses the sepia saturation to bring about a feeling of loneliness and isolation. This feeling is enhanced by the look of the downtrodden apartment block and its wild-looking inhabitants. Jeunet uses dark colouring to accentuate the dark nature of the film. The dark colourings are used to compliment the characters and the plot. At the end of this film, Jeunet lets the fog and sepia saturation clear away, giving us a glimpse of the bright sky. This symbolises the end of a horrible era, and the beginning of a better world.

Jeunet likes to cast characters with unusual and expressive facial features to make his films interesting and unique. Jeunet likes his characters to be diverse and unusual. In Amélie, Amélie herself has unusual personality traits,...