In anticipation of my trip to Paris this summer, another French Mortality Movie I recently rewatched is the 2001 film Amélie. This film is included in the Mortality and Living Fully chapter of 98.6 Mortality Movies to See Before You Die.
Set in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, Amélie follows a shy, imaginative young woman who quietly devotes herself to improving the lives of others through small anonymous acts of kindness. While she orchestrates joy for everyone around her, Amélie herself remains emotionally isolated and hesitant to form intimacy and risk love.
Two deaths shape her worldview early in the story: the sudden death of Princess Diana and the earlier loss of her mother, who was killed instantly when a tourist leapt from the heights of Notre Dame Cathedral, landing directly onto her. These moments of mortality become catalysts, pushing Amélie to confront her fear of connection and embrace the possibility of a fuller life. Death becomes the spark that makes her choose to live.
Love Beckons
Amélie is intrigued by Nino, a young man obsessed with collecting discarded photo booth pictures. He is fascinated by the anonymous faces left behind, little traces of lives momentarily captured and abandoned. She’s intrigued by this man who seems as quirky as she is. Instead of speaking directly to him, she sets him out on a playful scavenger hunt, hiding clues and photos that gradually draw them together.
One scene that struck me during this recent rewatch takes place on a ghost-train amusement ride filled with skeletons, darkness, and death imagery. Rather than becoming frightened, Amélie experiences an unexpectedly tender moment when a man wearing a death mask gently strokes her neck, as he makes ghostly sounds. In another film, the gesture might feel threatening. In Amélie, it becomes intimate and vulnerable. The scene transforms symbols of death into symbols of human connection. More than once, the film suggests that awareness of mortality can awaken us to life, love, and meaningful relationships.
Other Mortality Themes in Amélie
Her Father’s Shrine
Amélie’s father remains emotionally frozen after the death of his wife. He devotes himself to a small garden shrine and rarely ventures beyond his routines. His grief has made his world smaller and quieter. In a playful act of intervention, Amélie “kidnaps” his beloved garden gnome and arranges for photos of it traveling the world to be sent back to him. The absurd little joke ultimately nudges him toward life again, encouraging him to finally take the trip he had long postponed.
The Glass Man and the Fragility of Life
Amélie’s reclusive neighbor Raymond Dufayel, known as “The Glass Man,” lives with brittle bone disease. His physical fragility mirrors the emotional caution that keeps many characters in the film isolated and disconnected. Confined largely to his apartment, he spends his days repainting Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, endlessly trying to understand the expression of one young woman in the painting.
Through his friendship with Amélie, Dufayel becomes the person who recognizes her deepest problem: she spends so much time arranging life for others that she avoids fully participating in her own. He gently challenges her to stop hiding and take emotional risks before life passes her by.
Living Fully Before It’s Too Late
Although Amélie is whimsical and visually playful, the film quietly returns again and again to mortality, loneliness, missed opportunities, and the passage of time. Characters cling to memories, mourn lost relationships, and struggle with isolation. Yet the film never becomes bleak. Instead, it suggests that life’s fragility is precisely what makes human connection meaningful.
The film builds toward a classic Mortality Movie message: don’t wait too long to live fully or love honestly. Amélie finally realizes that creating happiness for others is not enough. She must also allow herself to be seen, vulnerable, and loved.
Gail Rubin, pioneering death educator, is the author of 98.6 Mortality Movies to See Before You Die, A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, and other books on end-of-life issues. She is a two-time TEDx speaker. Her most recent talk is “We offer a good death to our pets, why not our people?”