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.