Relationship Spotlight: Nino Quincampoix & Amélie Poulain (Amélie)

I may be asexual and aromantic, but I’m not averse to a good romance in my fiction, and I figured today’s pair was a fitting topic for Valentine’s Day.  Their story isn’t as gorgeous as that of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan from In the Mood for Love, but that story is also a major downer, romance-wise, where Amélie and Nino are all light and harmony.  No, not “all” – I should clarify.  Their pre-face-to-face courtship, as timid as it is whimsical, comes with its share of worries and potential heartbreak.  This love story, though, is a celebration, and these two people ultimately reflect that.

We’ll start with their not-quite meet-cute, a match made in oddball heaven.  As he gropes beneath a photo booth for torn-up shreds of discarded pictures, her heart beats right through the garden gnome stuffed inside her jacket.  Painfully shy Amélie feels an instant affinity with Nino but doesn’t get a chance to speak to him before he races off in pursuit of his bizarre holy grail.  In real life, it could have ended as easily as that, one of many missed opportunities that outrun us every day, but this is a modern-day Parisian fairytale, and Amélie and Nino are fated in their own peculiar way.  Ever since their mutually lonely childhoods, in which both longed for an absent playmate, they’ve been slowly making their way towards one another.  That’s why, when Nino leaves, he accidentally drops his photo album in the process. 

This is the “in” Amélie needs, the excuse to push herself to take the risk of real, genuine contact.  Their early advances play out in photographed disguises, strategically-placed disassembled messages, and homemade posters reaching out to an audience of one.  She captivates him with her inventive communiques, and though he’s not quite at her level, he does his best to respond in kind.  It’s a treasure hunt correspondence, Cinderella trying to get her prince to find her without the help of a glass slipper.  Their biggest obstacle is Amélie’s fear of taking the final steps required to get to Nino – every time she gets close, she retreats and falls back on yet more complicated schemes.  While her charmingly strange theatrics appeal to Nino’s imagination, he can only follow her trail so long before she has to let herself be found.

There’s a quote that says love is about falling “into mutually satisfying weirdness” with “someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours,” and that definitely comes to mind when I think of Amélie and Nino.  A young woman who records whimsy on her VCR and uses foot cream to commit acts of vengeance needs someone who will understand that and roll with it.  She needs someone who collects laughter, shoe impressions in concrete, and ripped-up photographs.  She needs someone who will follow arrows made of birdseed and woo her in a skeleton costume, and that’s what she discovers in Nino.  But their love story is more than just the magic, and she needs that, too.  She needs someone who will come back for her when she runs away, who will wait for her to be brave, open the door, and face the truth within her dream.  Though we don’t get as good a picture of what Nino needs, it’s clear that Amélie fits the rather unique bill.  It’s why he goes down all her rabbit holes, why he recognizes her through her disguises, and why he waits on the other side of the door.  It’s sweet, contented mutually satisfying weirdness, and I just adore it.