In my humble opinion no film in the last 50 years has done more for Paris tourism than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s charming Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. Best know in the U.S. as simply Amélie, the 2001 movie stars Audrey Tautou as the eponymous Amélie. Now, more than twenty years after the release of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jeunet has followed it up with La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain. 

In this hilarious true history, Jeunet has reinvented Amélie as a Soviet agent having been recruited in childhood with the promise of bubblegum and candy. Jeunet supports every detail of Amélie’s double life, and of the story of her re-entry into espionage after the fall of the Berlin Wall, using artfully re-edited scenes and the same characters from Amélie.

“After all this time,” Jeunet says in a brief introduction, “I felt the moment was right to tell you, at long last, the real story of Amélie Poulain.” She turns out, according to his voice-over narration that follows, not to be a simple Montmartre waitress who dedicates herself to surreptitiously enriching the lives of those around her.

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