A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend about characters
and their role in making a good film. It doesn’t matter how good your story
line is, if your characters aren’t credible the whole story will fall apart.
Well, you might be asking yourself why I called the post “Amelie”.
The story line of this film is quite simple: it is the story of a girl that
falls in love with a guy that she doesn’t know. It is not the most original
story, however, it’s the character that makes the film so interesting. Amelie
Poulain is not a simple girl, she is special and she has a lot of features that
take her and take the story to a different level. If Amelie had been a boring
character, there would be no story.
What would be of Amelie’s story with a flat character? Let’s
say that Marian, a girl that works in a cafe, finds a time-capsule in her apartment.
She is not a very curious girl, so she decided to put it in the bin. Then
Marian is walking on a train station and sees a guy that left a book behind.
She turns around and leaves. Obviously the Amelie movie cannot happen with a
flat character because the whole story is pushed on by the decisions the
character makes. If Amelie wasn´t curious she wouldn’t find the person that
owned the time-capsule or she wouldn’t meet her lover in the train station
(that is not how it happens but I don’t want to spoil the movie).
Conclusion, good characters make good stories. I loved
Amelie Poulain, but I would have hated a movie about a Marian Poulain.
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