The opening 20 minutes of Amélie-Delicatessen co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's sweet celebration of love and all things Parisian that took the French box office by storm earlier this year-are so good that the following 100 are inevitably a letdown. Jeunet is such a talented director, however, and lead actor Audrey Tautou is so beguiling, that "letdown" is perhaps a bit misleading. Lesser filmmakers would kill to pull off what Jeunet and his team have done here.

Fifty per cent sylph, 50 per cent sprite and 100 per cent romantic, the shy Amélie Poulain (the riveting Tautou) inhabits a storybook version of Paris' Montmartre district, a place curiously devoid of blemishes or real hardship, thanks to Jeunet's palette and the wonders of digital technology (graffiti and other nasty things were digitally erased). After a less than auspicious childhood, Amélie has grown up to become a waitress who takes immense pleasure in the small things-the taste of a ripe raspberry, the satisfactions to be had from a perfect crème brûlée-mainly because THE big thing is missing from her life. That is, of course, love.

After discovering (on the very day of Princess Di's death, no less) a box of old curios stashed away in her apartment, she embarks upon a whimsical plan. Digging up the original owner of the box, she anonymously returns the curios to him, and then, witnessing his ecstatic reaction, decides to try and bring similar joy into the lives of the people around her. All on the sly, of course. Will she do the same for Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz, director of The Crimson Rivers and Hate), the equally shy, equally eccentric young man whom Amélie feels drawn to?

Jeunet revels in artifice. In addition to a marvelously stylized Montmartre, the fantastic opening reels consist of a tour-de-force of montage, giving us Amélie's childhood at a breakneck clip that is at once hilarious and wildly visual. That Jeunet decides to serve up this humorous gambit with a little ground glass on the side is what elevates this section to the realm of the ineffable. Little Amélie's father's inability to make physical contact with her leads to her heart beating extra quickly the only times that he does-during the annual check-ups that he, being a doctor, gives her. This, in turn, leads him to diagnose a heart ailment, further alienating her from friends and family... If the rest of the film managed to approach the level of that great, tragic joke-representative of the brilliant mix of pain and humour in the film's prologue-Amélie would be a masterpiece.

Instead, what follows comes across too much like a big bowl of Christmas candy -sweet and delicious until you consume too much of it and start to feel the glucose overdose. Amélie is also too long, too repetitive and too coy-given that Nino and Amélie hover around each other seemingly forever, one could be forgiven for muttering "Just let the two of them meet, fer chrissakes!" Still, the film's audacity, artistry and insouciance - not to mention its oh-so-unfashionable optimism and its unabashed celebration of romantic longing - make you realize something that you once knew: film does indeed have the potential to be a great art form. And that doesn't happen very often anymore.