In 2004, my wife Karen and I hosted a “open screening” for the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, an event where local (and not so local, we had artists from several surropunding states show up) filmmakers could screen their in-progress or un-platformed short films and get feedback from their peers.

A composer named Hans Stiritz showed up with an amazing five-minute movie he called Before. Here’s how Hans described the project: 

“Late in 2003, I rediscovered some 8mm film that my German grandmother had shot during several trips traveling to visit my family in America in the late-60’s/early-70’s. Sifting through all the film, I noticed that she always included several shots of airports and airplanes for each visit. Flying on the big jets was still something special in that day.

“Using this ‘archival film,’ I created to take a nostalgic look at one family’s vision of the golden age of the ‘Jet Set’ and the magic of flight, and to consider how world events can cast new light (or shadow) on cherished memories.”

The film was poignant and charming, until the very end, when the camera pointed out the window of a 747 and the Twin Towers of  Manhattan’s World Trade Center invaded the frame. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so devasted by an on film moment. 

To give this some context, on the morning of September 11, 2001, my wife Karen and I were at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, expecting to fly home through Chicago to Little Rock. 

We had spent the previous four days at the Toronto International Film Festival, watching movies and going to parties and living out the surreality that comes from watching five movies a day and shooting tequila with Jake Gyllenhaal at night. 

Actually that was at the 2002 festival; at a party for Todd Haynes’s film Far from Heaven. I can’t quite remember exactly what we did on the evening of September 10, 2001; we probably made an early night of it knowing we were traveling in the morning. What we probably did was—after an early screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie—was have dinner in a Greek or Ethiopian restaurant and go to bed. 

We had just made it through security and we in line to buy a sandwich to eat on the plane when I looked up idly at a small TV monitor fastened about ten feet high on a column a few feet ahead of us. I didn’t react at all the first time I saw the jetliner crach into the World Trade Center. And for a long moment neither did anyone else.

It didn’t register as real. I thought it might be a trailer for a movie — I was in that mode. I thought it looked like cheap special effects that had been somewhat camouflaged by the director’s decision to present it as home video. I heard a man curse. I shrugged. 

We milled about, then we headed down the corridor to our gate and only when we got there did we realize our flight had been cancelled. Something felt tilted as we swam back against the current, back out through security the wrong way. Somehow I arrived back at the check-in counter, where a preoccupied Delta agent told us there was something wrong with our plane, that we’d have to be re-booked. All the while he was tapping away on a keyboard that wasn’t giving him anything back.

“I don’t understand,” he said through an apologetic smile. “I’ve never seen this before. U.S. airspace has been closed.” At that moment his supervisor appeared and whispered in his ear. I caught some of it — flight numbers. Commercial airliners.

Things were snapping into place. I told them what we’d seen on television, three, maybe five minutes earlier. We all realized at the same time the seriousness of what had happened. It’s the moment where our lives broke in half.

•••

Maybe because it was the movie I saw in what I now think of as the “Before” but I have unreasonably strong feelings about Amélie. It’s the only movie I ever remember getting into a real argument over as an adult.

I can and sometimes do offer strong opinions about the movies, but the cinematic experience is so subjective and personal it has always seemed silly to me to get combative about what are essentially matters of taste. But not long after Amélie was released I found myself at a dinner party where an academic suggested not only that Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind was a better film, but that Amélie was sentimental fluff for simple-minded people.

I nearly flipped over the dining room table.

Not that I have any particular animus against A Beautiful Mind — in my review from December 2001 I called it “a tasteful quality Hollywood motion picture — the kind that could win any number of Academy Awards” and concluded that, though some might call it “adventurous … because it takes as its hero an intellectual rather than a soldier or a spy … it is entirely conventional, unwilling to delve too deeply into the connections between creativity and madness, between inspiration and folly, and instead gives us another story of love conquering all, of the brave benighted sucking it up and just ignoring the demons calling to him.” 

I stand by that; I generally find Howard’s work pleasant, sturdy, and thoughtful. Yet dinner-party Herr Doktor thought it the best thing since bagged Chianti, which he had every right to do. He thought it highly moral because it portrayed a protagonist afflicted by mental illness. Fair enough. (He also allowed that he believed that individual genes have souls.)

But his slagging off on Amélie as a kitschy opiate for the masses did not sit well with me. Like a lot of other people, I love the film. It is a deeply humane picture that aspires to healing sweetness. And I recognize that the circumstances of how and when I saw it have much to do with my emotional attachment to the movie. It was — and remains — a souvenir of the world before we were used to magnetometers and the reflexive fear that rises whenever more than a few of us are gathered in a public place.

The irony of such a stupid argument coalescing around such a gentle-tempered work is not lost on me.

Some people will remember Amélie as the last film distributed by Miramax Zöe, the French division of notorious Harvey Weinstein’s production and distribution company. This association with Weinstein may be why Amélie, though nominated for five Oscars (sound, cinematography, art direction, original screenplay and foreign language film) was shut out at the 2002 Academy Awards. Even as far back as 2002, people were pretty sick of Weinstein. (Even I — a film critic in a tertiary market —was hearing rumors of his boorishness and bad behavior back then. I never heard about anything criminal but I wasn’t surprised the Weinstein story turned out the way it did.)

Jeunet had battles with Weinstein on earlier films, and there’s anecdotal evidence that Weinstein wanted to re-cut Jeune’s film. It was only after it started winning overseas awards — four Cesar Awards, three European Film Awards, two BAFTAs — that Weinstein began campaigning hard for the film.

Jeunet wrote in an online column that “the Academy, tired of Weinstein’s vote-collecting ‘abuse,’ decided to boycott his films.” Jeunet believes Amélie was collateral damage in this boycott. 

“Whoopi Goldberg, president of the (Oscars) ceremony, spent the entire ceremony making fun of Weinstein,” he wrote. “The result being, out of 19 nominations, he won only one Oscar” in 2002.

Amélie was originally distributed by UGC Fox Distribution, a French-American film production company formed in 1995 by GC — a company operating movie theaters in France and Belgium that until 1988 was known as Union Générale Cinématographique — and 20th Century Fox (now known as 20th Century Studios) to produce and distribute films across France. (UGC was absorbed into the French division of Fox in 2005.)

U.S. distribution rights to the film were sold to Miramax Zoë. Lionsgate had a deal to distribute Miramax films on DVD. But we all know what happened to Weinstein and Miramax, and Sony Pictures Classics — an autonomous division within Sony Pictures — now owns the U.S. distribution rights to Amélie. SPC exercised those rights on Valentine’s Day, 2024, re-releasing the film in two hundred and fifty theaters across the country.

Considering how much of an impact Amélie made on me, I was surprised when my rresearch revealed I didn’t review the film  for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. 

But I sat beside the critic who did. 

•••

Amélie — the original French title was Le Fabuleux Destin d’ Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie  Poulain) — is a whimsical and quirky tale of the guiless title character (Audrey Tautou), a painfully shy gamine in a Louise Brooks bob who comes to believe her life’s work is delivering uncomplicated happiness to the people around her through innocent Rube Goldberg-ish pranks. Jeunet can fairly be described as a sort of Gallic Terry Gilliam, as he often seems concerned with overly intricate mechanisms and the amplified unintended consequences of seemingly trivial occurrences.

But Amélie lacks the kernel of bitterness that markedthe director’s earlier films, (especially those made in collaboration with the animator Marc Caro) like 1991’s Delicatessen and 1996’s The City of Lost Children. Those are fantastic dystopian visions populated with well-intended freaks, capitalistic scoundrels and imperiled innocents. They read more like disturbing dreams than black comedies.

In contrast, Amélie is a romantic confection, as much a valentine to the Paris-locked village of Montmartre as it is to Tautou’s uncomplicated loveliness, which echoes that of another Audrey, name of Hepburn.

A second delight can be found in the way that Jeunet employs computer animation, which in 2001 still had an air of edgy dubiousness about it. Yet here, when Amélie turns her wide brown eyes up to a brilliant blue French sky and sees bunny-shaped clouds, the effect is digital enchantment.

While the film is set in Paris in 1997 — around the time of Princess Diana’s death — Jeunet conjures up a storybook city with all traces of modern banality digitally removed. This is a hyper-saturated Paris with the Pompidou Centre and glass towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale elided (just as the Twin Towers would be elided from some of the New York stories that screened at Toronto that year), a nostalgic CGI-derived Paris that feels timeless and dream-like, stylized in the way of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, a pastel Paris far warmer and less sinister than the one portrayed in Baz Luhrman’s lurid Moulin Rouge! that was released in the U.S. a little more than a month after Amélie was released in France.

It is one of those odd cinematic coincidences that Moulin Rouge! and Amélie in some ways seem to be in conversation with each other — both are highly stylized films set in Montmartre, with Moulin Rouge” (which was mainly filmed on soundstages at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia) portraying the neighborhood as a seedy and lewd corner of the world and Amélie proffering it as benign and neighborly; the cafe Amélie works in is a real place called Café des 2 Moulins — “the two windmills.” Both directors playfully indulge certain Parisian stereotypes. Neither is terribly subtle.

The very funny first act of the film provides us with backstory. Amélie’s childhood and parents are sketched, largely through a comic voiceover (in French) by a rumbling Andre Dussolier who explains the particular tastes of Amélie’s neurotic mother and emotionally cool father, and how that effectively discouraged their daughter from making friends or becoming anything more than a waitress in a small cafe. All that is prologue to the day in her unremarkable apartment when she stumbles across a tin box hidden behind the tiles in her bathroom, belonging to a previous tenant, who was then a lonely little boy.

Amélie contrives a covert way to reunite the owner — now a lonely grandfather — with his possessions, and his shock and gratitude convince her to make this sort of secret do-gooding her life’s work. These playful, childlike missions are interrupted when she meets and falls in very grown-up love with Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz, director of La Haine), a part-time cashier at a Pigalle porn shop whose shyness and fragility mirrors Amélie’s. Nino collects discarded photo-booth strips — he roots them out from beneath the booth with a ruler — and preserves them in an album.

Amélie has been watching him from afar when he accidentally drops the album at a railway station. She sets about returning the album and getting Nino to fall in love with her. 

How could he not? 

On the other hand, It’s not hard to resist Amélie if you set out to do so. The movie’s  Paris is not real-life Paris, it has been largely scrubbed of crime and immigrants, and more than one dinner party academic has found a way to pronounce it “racist” over the years.

This despite one of the featured actors, Jamel Debbouze, being of Moroccan descent. And the myriad ethnicities mounted in Nino’s photo album.

It’s a fairy tale; some think it should be more representative of the multicultural reality of Paris. I don’t suppose that’s an illegitimate idea, but my philosophy has always been to grant movies license enough to work whatever magic they might possess. If I’m not put off by a film’s politics — and yes, every film has politics — I don’t probe for reasons to take offense. I realize this attitude can make me seem like a soft grader but so be it. I’m one of those movie critics who likes movies and who can find watching even a dull  or insipid movie genuinely interesting, even if I’m only trying to suss out what went wrong. 

 (Were up to me, I’d never distill a movie into a numerical score, a thumbs-up or down, a ripe or rotten tomato, or a trio of dancing popcorn boxes. I’ve used grading scales only at the insistence of editors, not because I find them meaningful or useful. When tasked with creating a scoring system for films, I intentionally made it complex, drawing inspiration in part from the nuanced approach employed by wine critic Robert Parker to evaluate wines.) 

In her review, Karen concluded that Amélie “succeeds because, despite its setting in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities, despite adult situations, despite romantic entanglements, and despite its unique interweaving of computer animation around a real world, it still retains a naive sense of wonder. Amélie’s picturesque, peculiar universe is not like ours, and that makes it a desirable destination, at least for a couple of hours.”

A couple of uncomplicated hours of escape. Which is what a lot of people are looking for when they go to the movies, Herr Doktor.

•••

Back in the first few moments of the After, none of us knew what to do, so adrenaline took over.

Karen went to the pay phone—neither of us had mobile devices, yet, and if we’d have had them we’d have left them at home to avoid international roaming charges (friends of ours had reported racking up exorbitant bills thanks to international roaming, our newspaper had provided us with a calling card that allowed us to charge long distance to the company after punching in a comically long series of numbers). She called our hotel, to try to get our room back. 

The shaken Delta agent provisionally booked us on a next-day flight. I went to the Thomas Cook counter and got some fresh Canadian cash.

As we walked out of the airport, a woman stood in the middle of the ticketing hall crying softly into her cell phone.

We got in a limo and rode back to Toronto, as our driver—a tidy middle-aged Sikh in a blue blazer and crisp white shirt—told us “they” had hit the World Trade Center in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and that a car bomb had gone off in front of the State Department in Washington.

I held Karen’s hand and rather self-dramatically told her it would never be the same again, that we were in a different kid of war. 

We decided we needed to somehow get to New York, thinking that maybe we could rent a car, it was about an eight-hour drive away. We got back to the hotel, up to our room—a different one than the one we’d had, but a santuary nevertheless—and called our office. We were closer to Manhattan than any other newspaper employees, we knew the city, we should go to New York and report what we could report. Already there were some reporters on the road. 

But then we learned the border had been sealed and a security perimeter had been set up for fifty miles around New York City. No rental cars were available anyway. The Hollywood Elite had snapped them up. Some of them had rented buses. But nobody was getting across the border, probably not for a few days.

So we went back to the festival, to sit in the dark for a while. 

We went to a screening of Pinero, a film by Leon Ichaso about Miguel Pinero, the Puerto Rican poet and playwright who rose to prominence as a co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the mid-1970s. About fifteen minutes into the film, which is set mainly on New York’s Lower East Side, not too far from where the towers stood, the lights came up and a festival volunteer announced that the screening, along with all other screenings planned for that day, was canceled, as were all press conferences and social events.

So we wandered over to the festival’s press lounge in the Park Hyatt, in the press room set up for the Toronto International Film Festival. For a while we sat on the floor with hundred other journalists from all over the world, watching what the CBC warned was raw unedited footage. They showed a thrashing figure leaping—or falling—from one of the towers. They showed people cheering in the West Bank. Someone cursed, someone giggled nervously, heads turned. A photographer from the Toronto Star took our picture.

We left, to walk the streets. Bomb threats were being phoned in to government offices in Ottawa. There was a police and fire cordon around a block of Bay Street in front of the Royal Ontario Museum. Karen asked what it was about and the fireman told her “public safety.” We ate our airport sandwiches in a park filled with students and mild sunlight. There were hand-lettered signs in the shop windows: “Our Canadian hearts are with you.” 

There was a little girl on the television saying it was sad because Canada and America “were the same.” Stores were closed, tall buildings emptied. Everywhere were tender looks and soft words; patience spread like a balm.

I remember the festival — it was a good one, along with Amélie, we saw Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.I remember talking to Arliss Howard and Debra Winger about our mutual friend, the Mississippi writer Larry Brown, whose short stories had formed the basis of their movie Big Bad Love. I remember Joaquin Phoenix in Buffalo Soliders, an enjoyably caustic story about military inequity.

You probably have never heard of Buffalo Soldiers. It took two more years for it to make it into theaters; Miramax, who acquired distribution rights to the film on Sept. 10, didn’t think the public would be receptive of a movie that portrayed American troops as cynical schemers and thieves. 

It wasn’t the only festival movie affected by the attacks, a madcap Barry Sonnenfeld comedy called Big Trouble  which was based on a Dave Barry novel about a plot to smuggle a nuclear device onto a plane. It was originally scheduled to hit theaters immediately after the festival; the release date was pushed back to April of the next year. When it was eventually released, Big Trouble struggled at the box office, earning just $8.5 million against a $40 million budget. While its reception may not have been stellar regardless, we can surmise that the delay and content sensitivity contributed to its underperformance. In April 2002 people were simply not ready to consume movies about bombs on airplanes.

Similarly, the New York-set Serendipity — honestly a rather horrible romantic comedy — was delayed a week or two so that shots of the Twin Towers could be edited out. Even Ed Burns’ modestly charming  Sidewalks of New York was pushed back to allow a a little judicious trimming.

•••

Most of the restaurants in Toronto were closed that night, but we found a small Sherpa restaurant off Bay Street, we drank wine and ate momos and talked about our dread. 

When the airports remained closed on September 12, we decided to try to make our way to Cleveland on the bus, where Karen’s father would put us up for the night. The border was open again, the customs agent assured us. We re-re-booked our plane ticket to take us out of Cleveland Hopkins, figuring it might be easier to get home on a domestic flight. We though we’d have more options in Cleveland, or at least a place to sleep for free. Maybe we really just wanted to keep moving.

The next  morning we made it over the border ona Greyhound bus. There were fourteen of us, and we were told we were the first to cross the border after it was re-opened. I talked briefly to one of our fellow travelers, he had flown to Toronto from Boston; his plane had left Logan Internation at approximately the same time as the hijacked planes. At U.S. Customs, they didn’t even look in our bags, they waved us through. It couldn’t have taken ten minutes for us to clear.

Waiting to change buses in Buffalo, we were jostled—rudely, I thought—by a man named Mohammed. (I looked at his luggage tag.) I cut hard eyes at him but he turned out to be a simple businessman, on his way to Cincinnati, then on to Birmingham, Alabama.

We settled in, across the aisle from a young woman with two small, beautiful children and a couple of rows ahead of an old couple dressed in Navy uniforms, both of them wearing dark glasses—the wraparound kind people wear after they’ve had something medical done to their eyes. Our bus was quiet and its passengers sedate and we hummed along the south edge of Lake Erie, through the farmlands and the shooting woods of the American Midwest, past prisons that look like high schools and high schools that feel like prisons.

I wrote a column on that bus, scribbling in longhand on foolscap, which ended with these lines:

You have caught up with me now, I am writing this on [the] bus straining to make sense of what we’re going through and how the world has changed. It does me no good to tell you the details I think I know, by the time you read this some of what I think I know will have turned out to be misinformation, the rest will be old news.

You have to trust me on this, because I know it sounds like a cheap trick, the kind of detail a hack might make up, but the opposite window has just filled with the chrome wall of a semi-trailer, on which is decaled the words “American Pride.” There is an eagle anda stars and stripes motif and the proprietor’s—the driver’s?—name and pertinent info stenciled across the back doors: “Geo. H. Golding Inc./Lockport, N.Y./Crystal River, Fla./Committed to Personal Dependable Service.”

I have never paid much attention to displays like these, I’ve never felt much one way or the other about them. But I can tell you that right now, this minute, I needed to see Mr. Golding’s truck, I needed the irony-free symbolism and the naive corny faith of it, the Rockwellian amour-propre of the American working class.

I am on a bus to Cleveland, my wife is dozing in the seat beside me and I am scribbling in my little book and I know we will be all right. I know things have changed, but it’s not all for the worse. We are together on the bus, we meet each other’s gaze, we speak, we help each other with our bags.

We can get used to riding buses, it’s not so bad to hug the ground and see the places we routinely fly over. We all have our fly-over territories, places we hardly ever visit. Some of those are out there.

I can feel a hawkishness rising in me, and I sense most of the people on this abus feel it too. I don’t know if it’s the worst part of me or not, but it’s probably a necessary part. The enemy has convinced kids they ought to want to die for his dubious cause, a cause which seems to consist of nothing more or less than a hatred of democracy and the abundant liberties of the modern world.

We can see this as an opportunity to make abetter world. We are right and they are wrong. It’s not a relative question. Bad people have blown a hole in the world and we must match their resolve if not their cruelty. And so we will.

We made it back —we took a bus to Cleveland, rented a car and drove straight through to Little Rock under empty skies. And got on with the second part of our lives.

In the After.