Tautou's Face

Reactions in France to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's phenomenally successful film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) tend to fall into two groups. According to one perspective, the film is a superficial and racially sanitized form of cinetourism; according to another, it is a profound and sincere celebration of traditional French values. For both groups, the cultural work the film performs coalesces around close-ups of the face of Audrey Tautou, the film's star. This essay asks how Tautou's face and the close-up shot it exemplifies can say so much while showing so little. By drawing on the theoretical history of camera distance, it argues that the formal design of the close-up, which demands simultaneously an analytic and an affective response to the visual image, usefully informs the relations between political reactions to the film and French debates around the question of national identity at the start of the twenty-first century.