Éloge de l'amour: "Amélie" at 25

Amélie - ageless Amélie - is 25 this year, which means we've all had ample time to work out where we stand on it. Is this, as Xan Brooks argued earlier this week in The Independent, mere moodboard cinema, with a cloyingly cutesy-poo heroine who embodies all the worst aspects of the 21st century's main character syndrome? (Even if, granted, she is the main character of a film called, you know, Amélie.) Is it still, as many believed at the time, a defining modern date movie? This is an unfashionable confession, but I too had previously found Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film affecting up to a point. Beneath its sugarcoated crème brûlée toplayer, its garrulous array of kooks and quirks and talking inanimate objects, it always struck me as a rare romcom with some understanding of solitude. There are moments during that melancholy stretch in the middle - governed above all else by the sad pools of Audrey Tautou's eyes and Yann Tiersen's immediately evocative piano-and-accordion score, very much the Buena Vista Social Club sound of autumn 2001 - when Jeunet allows us to sit quietly with its heroine's (sometimes self-imposed) loneliness; a creative choice that makes it all the more lovely and moving when she does finally find someone (and someone who might actually be right for her, given his comparably curious habits). Rewatching the film again this week, I was most struck by the solitude of those around her. The denizens of the Deux Moulins cafe, walled off in separate booths, separate lives; the woman in the fake Renoir painting; the neighbours, in their own little boxes; Lady Di, killed in the pursuit of true love. All the lonely people. Where do they all come from?

It's something of a miracle that we ever notice their plight(s). Jeunet had dropped his old partner-in-crime Marc Caro some years before, yet he'd retained the insistent busyness and eccentric character playing of the pair's breakthroughs Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. Though Amélie would prove more overtly crowdpleasing, there is still a lot of clutter around the film's heart. (Much more than I remember there being, in fact.) Yet in certain moments, Jeunet still had the energy to clear the table of childish things and flirt with something tragically real: the fear of growing old alone, of dying without having known love. That's... well, that's more than we were offered in the same year's more generously reviewed Bridget Jones's Diary, which introduced a very different romantic heroine, and played out her travails as winking, cringe-inducing farce. Jeunet has Paris in the summertime, a yen to make cinema rather than Bridget's television, and Tautou, the actress as petting-zoo creature: doe-eyed yet oddly bovine in her responses, as if she were just about the last person on set to realise what Jeunet was getting at here. We can surely agree it's an acquired taste: this review may be as close as I'm going to get to responding in any favourable way to Wes Anderson's recent doodles. And it's as simplistic in its worldview as anything made in Paris with Raimu seventy years before, rewarding our gal's virtue while punishing the grocer's brutish sins. More than most recent anniversary reissues, Amélie does now seem a relic of an older world, and not just because it opened mere days or weeks before 9/11. Jeunet made one further attempt at a grand cinematic statement - with 2005's sputtering period romance A Very Long Engagement, again with Tautou - before beating a total retreat into trivia. This time round, I came to look upon his best-known film with the residual fondness one feels for an old flame, while also wondering why I fell so hard for it in the first place, and feeling a pang of nostalgia for the days when a French romcom could become not just a hit but a pop-cultural totem - a film that inspired such passions you had to take sides on it. Where have they gone?

Amélie returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.

On demand: "The Witches"

The family sector had grown so unignorably vast by the end of the 1980s that even Nicolas Roeg - the visionary behind the altogether adult Don't Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance - was tempted by the offer of a fat Warner Bros. payday. 1990's The Witches, from more or less the same moment as Tim Burton's Batman, at least saw its maker drawn towards a darker hued bedtime story in the form of the Roald Dahl perennial about a global network of witches working overtime to kill children. The adaptation was by Don't Look Now scribe Allan Scott; the results were not exactly A Minecraft Movie. Roeg, for one, took the opportunity to lean back into the Gothic, much as he had in his early days as a cinematographer on Roger Corman's Poe films. After a prologue of ominous warnings passed on by kindly grandma Mia Zetterling to her now American grandson Luke (Jasen Fisher, so expressive Spielberg pinched him for his subsequent Hook), everybody decamps to the Hotel Excelsior, a seafront art deco hostelry run by Rowan Atkinson's hapless manager Mr. Stringer; there, granny and Luke's fellow travellers include the patrons of a conference staged by the so-called Royal Society for the Protection of Children, where keynote speaker Anjelica Huston proposes the mass extermination of all kiddiwinks in a thick Germanic accent. The ambience is not unlike that of any Tory party conference of the 1980s - Mrs. T would have found herself right at home amid the curling cucumber sandwiches - but you can tell this was a production with American money to spend from its disproportionately spacious idea of coastal British hotel rooms.

For a while, you could be forgiven for thinking Roeg has simply bedded down in these environs to gaze, with much the same mix of awe and fear displayed by young Luke, upon large groups of witchy and bewitching women. Huston wafts into shot, peers disdainfully at the British character actors wibbling and bibbling several feet beneath her (primetime favourites one and all: Atkinson, Bill Paterson, Brenda Blethyn, Jane Horrocks, Jim Carter) and clinches the Morticia gig in the following year's The Addams Family, if she hadn't already. (She also, in passing, peels off her own scalp with a flourish, a sequence pushing at the upper limits of the PG certificate.) As Dahl's byzantine narrative unfolds, however, one starts to wonder whether Roeg the visionary was drawn this way by the prospect of a hero who spends much of the film transformed into a talking mouse, and whether The Witches had any influence on another visionary, George Miller, determining to adapt Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig as Babe a few years later. Though initially a little clunky and rough-hewn in comparison with the matinee delights that followed it, this Witches soon starts to beguile: anecdotal evidence would suggest kids everywhere continue to thrill to the mouse (and mouse-eye) photography, while accompanying adults can savour Roeg's slyer allusions to the idea this hotel isn't as above board as it first seems, not least Stanley Myers' score, with its pronounced echoes of The Shining. Remade - or, rather, retold - by Robert Zemeckis, an Eighties graduate with no particular flair for the Gothic, in 2020; I haven't seen the official statistics, but I should imagine its predecessor scared an entire generation out of accepting sweets from strangers.

The Witches is currently streaming via HBO Max and NOW, available to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.