As Los Angeles Times critic Carina Chocano points out, our July film is a “re-imagining” of the Audrey Hepburn classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But Priceless stars another irresistible Audrey — the French actress with the last name of Tautou.
Tautou was pretty much Gallic-bound until Amelie, which broke out of French borders and became a global hit in 2001.
Tautou had the good fortune to do Amelie with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The world has no more visual a film director. Jeunet was the perfect choice to capture the magic quality of Amelie in which the title character, alone and lonely for much of the movie, dedicates her life to easing the peculiar pain of others. There is, for example, the anguish of a failed writer and the suffering of a man whose bones are as brittle as glass. You can’t take your eyes off Jeunet’s luxuriant screen or Tautou’s kindly face.
Tautou also worked with Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement (2004), a film that only the French could get away with. It’s about an obsession: Mathilde (Tautou) will not believe that her lover, Manech, has been killed in the Great War — and not just killed but tossed out to the Germans, as a hunk of meat is thrown to lions. Mathilde was a childhood victim of polio and must walk with a heavy brace. She’s off kilter in other ways, too. She plays the tuba next to a lighthouse around which waves crash. A subtitle tells us that only the sound of the tuba has the power to register distress. If Amelie is magic, then A Very Long Engagement is WWI muddy and grim, but just as irresistible. It’s melodrama you can’t argue with — because the French did it.
Tautou has a strong role as a chambermaid in the Stephen Frears film Dirty Pretty Things (2002), which is about as far from Amelie and A Very Long Engagement as you can get. It’s an exceptional piece of realism about prostitution and organ trafficking in a run-down West London hotel. Frears meant to play Tautou’s innocence against the sordidness going on all around her.
And of course, Tautou is the “cryptologist” who works with the long-haired Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code (2006) to solve the mystery of the Holy Grail or the Knights Templar (or whatever — I forget). But she’s out-starred by Hanks. If you are a cryptologist in a Ron Howard film, you just don’t have much to do.