At this particular time in world history, it would take a pretty special film to pack theatres full of desperate people in dire need of having their spirits lifted.  Five months ago, you would have expected the saving grace of the cinematic year that was (is) 2001 to have been something directed by Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg – not a picture without a single international star, and definitely not a French import that couldn't even worm its way into this year's Cannes lineup.

After being snubbed by Cannes, writer-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet decided to release his film in France just before the snooty fête began, stealing a surprisingly large chunk of its thunder in the process.  Now, after being seen by a whopping 8 million people in its native country and winning audience awards at three film festivals, Amélie is set to bow in North America...and it couldn't come at a better time.  No joke – this is exactly the film people need to pull themselves out of the funk of 9/11.  If you could bottle Amélie, there would be no ill in the world.  The studio wasn't messing around when they came up with the film's tagline – "She'll change your life."

Amélie is broken into three acts, the first of which is presented at a marvelously breakneck speed that doesn't let up on the non-stop laughs for 15 minutes.  We quickly learn Amélie's life story, beginning, literally, with the moment of her 1973 conception and meandering through major events in her life, like the suicide of her goldfish, the misdiagnosis of a heart defect and the darkly funny death of her mother.

The second shows an adult Amélie (Audrey Tautou, Venus Beauty Institute) living in solitude while spending her days as a waitress at a Parisian café. Like her mother and father in the opening act, Amélie's co-workers, customers and neighbors are each introduced in amazing detail, explaining their likes, dislikes and other assorted quirks.  As you'd expect from Jeunet, they're all quite an odd bunch, including, but not limited to, an extremely rude customer (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon), a Unbreakable-like brittle-boned artist who paints the same picture over and over again (Serge Merlin), an authoritarian grocery store owner (Urbain Cancelier), and the assistant who gets a little too excited about the quality of the vegetables (Jamel Debbouze).

When Amélie finds a hidden box of toys from the '50s in the wall of her house and successfully tracks down its original owner, she decides her eccentric wiles could best be used doing anonymous good deeds for friends and strangers alike.  But that's before she gets her own third-act love interest in a train station photo booth-obsessed man named Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz, Jakob the Liar).  In atypical fashion, the shy Amélie doesn't approach Nino in the way we expect to see two young potential lovebirds fall for each other.

I have never seen anything as sweet, romantic and funny, and despite screening the film in a theatre seating over 1,000 people at the Toronto International Film Festival, you could have heard a pin drop during the starry-eyed finale that left most of the crowd in tears before they jumped to their feet in thunderous applause that eclipsed that of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, which, like Amélie, unspooled in Toronto (and both took home the Festival's prestigious Audience Award).

Jeunet is probably best known for the wild and daringly original Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, but, unfortunately, more American eyes have seen his previous and most disappointing film, Alien: Resurrection.  His fans, riding the wave of disenchantment from that film (his only American offering), probably cringed upon hearing that his next picture would be a romantic fable, but they have nothing to worry about.  Amélie is full of Jeunet's long zoom shots and more of the vibrant color he used in Delicatessen.

But best of all is Tautou, whose Amélie is a naïve waif with her head in the clouds, wide eyes like pools of ink and a smile that could destroy the polar icecaps.  With her long, slender body, porcelain skin and jet-black hair, Amélie is equal parts Snow White and Audrey Hepburn.  Change your life?  Hell, she'll steal your heart, too.

You want to talk about Amélie's potential for Oscar success?  Okay. Let's start with its distributor, Miramax, who perennially and ferociously crams at least one of its films down the throats of every Academy member (how else do you explain the nominations for Chocolat?).  Now that the studio's Gangs of New York is off the 2001 calendar, they'll be putting everything they've got into this film.  And as I mentioned before, Amélie won the Audience Award at the Toronto Fest, which, in three of the last four years, has been an incredibly accurate harbinger of staggering year-end accolades (American Beauty, Life is Beautiful and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).  And let's not forget the last major foreign import to co-star a lawn gnome, because The Full Monty made the trip down the red carpet as well.

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for sexual content