The Bechdel Cast - Amelie with Hana Michels

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

Bonjour! After a trip to the discotheque, Jamie and Caitlin examine Amelie with special guest Hana Michels!(This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast. Follow @HanaMichels on Twitter! While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @hamburgerphone  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right, the only, Katherine Hahn is joining us on Las Culturistas. That's right, the queen of comedy herself. Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories,

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The patriarchy's effing vast. Start changing it with the Bechdel cast. Bonjour. Hello there. Bonjour. Welcome to the... Nope. Nope.

Welcome to... Can you start? Bonjour. Hi, welcome to Can you start? Bonjour. Hi, welcome to the Bechdelcast. My name's Caitlin Doron. Oh, Caitlin Doron? Oui. My name's Jemmy.

Loftin. I'm like, there's too many hard consonants. I'm not going to do it. There's one hard consonant. We, this is the bestia. This is the bestial cause. This is the bestial cause. We got to stop. We have to stop.

I think that it's good that we got it out at the top because we don't know how to do it. This is the Bechtel cast. We talk about the portrayal of women in movies. We talk about the portrayal of French people in movies. Specifically. We only talk about Beauty andal of French people in movies. Specifically. We only talk about Beauty and the Beast and today's movie.

And Chocolat. Chocolat. Starring Alva Molina. Yeah, yeah. We use the Bechdel test as a jumping off point to start a larger conversation about how women

are represented and treated and portrayed in cinéma. Cinéma. The cinémathèque. Oui. There's that really good Flight of the Conchords song.

Oh. Baguette. Baguette. Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour, monsieur. Anyway, the reason we're talking about French people in France so much is that we're talking

about the movie Amelie. But before we get into it, let's introduce our guest who's been very patiently waiting. So sorry. She is the co-creator and co-writer of Mom Presents, I Think These Guys Are Hot Stuff, Hannah Michaels! Hey! Hey, what's up? Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I was having fun listening to that. That's the name of the song. It's so funny. Why does that come up in that there's there must be someone i forget what

happens that makes that song happen i forget oh you know what i bet it is i bet in new zealand they take french like we take spanish like it's just obligatory so then there's those phrases that you just know and nothing else right yeah that's why they keep saying bibliotech. Yeah. And discotheque. Yeah. Well, anyway, so we're talking about Amelie. Hannah, when did you first see this movie?

What is your relationship to it? Tell us everything. What I realized when I watched it again is I don't actually hate Amelie. I hate dudes who suggest I would like Amelie. Okay. I agree with that. I did enjoy rewatching this movie. I was kind of, because sometimes when we revisit movies that I've been attached to in my past,

it's, I mean, as it is for us all, we have to take a long, hard look at a movie we love and say, oh no, this has shaped who I am in a way that has had negative effects. I was ready for that to happen for Amelie and I was not as disappointed as I thought I would be yeah yeah same same I my reaction to it the first time was like really angry and then looking back it's just like oh this is my relationship with a dude who suggested that I watch it like this right so you were projecting some maybe negative feelings toward a specific man to the movie? I mean, Amelie is like, I guess an anxious pixie dream girl, kind of.

She's not like a, she's not manic, but she's romanticized for social anxiety in a lot of ways. Yeah, this movie does a lot of weird stuff with mental illness where she's like, but okay, that was a choice. Yeah. A lot of choices are made yeah yeah yeah there's a lot of stalking in this movie there's a lot of stalking a lot of orchestrating of like very like rube goldberg almost crazy things where you have to go to this place and then to follow these arrows to do this thing and then look through this thing and did it it was one of those things where there's a few scenes especially and where i'm getting way ahead but like the you know

last third of this movie is amelie basically setting up this really demented obstacle course to make some guy fall in love with her and the twist is it works but uh but if you score that movie a little bit differently it's straight up a murder film because she's like at pay phones wearing sunglasses and if there's like a little like no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, oh, she's dangerous. She's a scary lady. Okay. I do agree that there is a specific kind of guy who will recommend this movie to you.

And I don't know exactly what it is about them that bothers me. But I know that all the music from my least favorite student film of all time is ripped directly from Amelie. Are you talking about Love, Bacardi, Boston? Of course I'm talking about Love, Bacardi, Boston. It's online to all our listeners. You've got to watch Love, Bacardi, Boston. If you've dated me for over, I would say, three weeks, you've seen Love, Bacardi, Boston. If you haven't, it's available to you online.

And Caitlin, because we've been dating for what a year and a half now a while yeah uh caitlin has seen lump of cardi boston i think what twice one and a half one and a half well that can be resolved but yeah it's like it's it's a shitty student film that like uses amelie's music in a very egregious, transparent, earnest way that'll make you just want to die. That's the other thing I realized. It's not the movie, it's the offshoots. Like, if there's no Amelie, there's no Garden State.

If there's no Amelie, there's no Travelocity Gnome. Yeah, that tracks. It just created a cultural moment where it's like there's a lot of cool romantic shit but also there's a lot of romanticizing people who aren't people they're just yeah ideas right i first saw the movie i want to say i was in college this movie also came out in 2001 another 2001 joint i saw it in college i had a friend came out in 2001. Another 2001 joint. I saw it in college. I had a friend recommend it to me. A woman, as a matter of fact.

There was no man who was saying, Oh, I watched this. I think I like this movie. You should watch it. And that is how they all talk. Yeah. Why don't you want to watch the thing with me? Why don't you want to watch Blade Runner with me? I saw it probably around like 2004, 2005, a few years after it came out.

This is interesting because it's one of the few foreign films. This is the first foreign movie we've done on the podcast. It's one of the few foreign films that have crossed over into mainstream American cinema. In a pretty big way. Yeah, big way. I meant to do more research on sort of film cinema history. I will go into this a little bit later. I didn't do enough research, but I'll just say what I know from the film classes I took in college where I did get one of two degrees that I do have in film, the second one being a master's degree in screenwriting from Boston University. I don't like to bring it up.

I can't believe you made me bring it up. But I did do that. So I just, it's out there now and now you know. But I'm interested in exploring French cinema a bit and why maybe this movie, unlike many other French films, was able to sort of cross crossover into American mainstream cinema. Anyway, yeah, I saw it in college. I remember liking it enough that I bought it on DVD. And I was like, Oh, what a fun, whimsical movie. And then I don't think I watched it again, even though I did have it very accessible to me on DVD, because also, brag, I have a DVD player.

You do. Uh-huh. There's no way around it. But I did, I, like, it just went on the shelf, and then I haven't watched it again until yesterday. So. Interesting. It shows you how much I cared about re-watching it. I came to this movie, and I'm curious at how many young women have this experience.

I first became aware of this movie on basically Tumblr and Tumblr adjacent websites. I was like eight or nine when the movie came out. So I wasn't like aware of it, of French cinema at that time. But fast forward a couple of years when I was in high school, I do remember seeing it. It would pop up a lot. There's a couple of years when I was in high school, I do remember seeing it. It would pop up a lot. There's a lot of screen caps. I can remember clearly specifically the one where she says, I'm nobody's little weasel. Saw that a million times on the primitive Internet.

My old live journal where I wrote poetry. That's probably where it, yeah, like websites like that. Because I'm like, this would have been a little bit before Tumblr was big. Because Tumblr was really big when I was like in late high school, college. But stuff like that where I had seen so much of this movie. I'm like, this looks cute. What's this? What's this?

And then finally I saw it on TV and was like, oh my God. I really, really, really liked this movie in high school. Kind of forgot about it. And then rewatched it, I i would say for the first time in at least five years today and it i was pleasantly surprised that there's one specific plot point in this movie that i had totally forgotten that i find very upsetting but for the most part i'm like oh this is misguided in a lot of ways but given the fact that it's 2001 i was pleasantly surprised at how well it held up for me yeah it's cute it's it's a lot more cute than i'm giving it credit for because

of the dudes who are like hey you're socially anxious watch this that but yes yes but other than that like it's a cute film with some ideas about love that are not the greatest but that's fine because we all did have those how did you first come across that's part of why is i dated some dude in college and i was older than you guys when i saw it which is probably another reason um that i didn't like it as much i'm 31 if oh i see what you mean but you saw like yeah for the first time right i just want everyone to know that i'm 31 oh my god okay she's like kayla's like compulsively spouting information she's like i went to college this is my age please don't say your pin number

i'm having a stroke anyway that's what you new catchphrase I definitely think that if I had seen this movie in college for the first time I probably still would have liked it I don't think I would have been as extremely attached to it as I was in high school because it's so easy to plug yourself into Amelie and be like oh there is some sort of as long as you

make an incredibly complicated and scary plan to force someone to fall in love with you you can still be a little bit shy which at that time i was very responsive to that message sure as a 14 year old girl with a back brace i was like oh hell yeah we can pull this off this is fine yes he has a 23 year old girl i was like, oh, hell yeah. We can pull this off. This is fine. Yeah, see, as a 23-year-old girl, I was like, no, that doesn't work. I've tried it. I'll do the recap of this story. We focus

on a character named Amelie. She is a French gal living in France. Ever heard of it? Isn't she in Paris? I'm not sure, but I would guess so. Okay. French listeners, those who have not abandoned us, let us know where Amelie takes

place, if it's in Paris or not. Also, missed opportunity, no one draws her like one of their French girls. Anyway. Just had to shoehorn that Titanic reference in there. And I am not sorry. God almighty.

Amelie is about a young woman. We meet her as a child. that Titanic reference in there. And I am not sorry. God Almighty. God Almighty. Amelie is about a young woman. We meet her as a child. Audrey Tattoo. So part of the story is that her dad doesn't hug her enough. So she, and he's a doctor, so whenever he gives her a monthly checkup, her heart beats so fast that the excitement of him touching her,

that it makes him think that she has a heart condition and then it affects her the entire rest of her life because which first of all means probably her dad's not a very good doctor right or he's like maybe i should get a second opinion like it's nuts yeah so he is so they're like well she has a heart condition she can't go to school so she's homeschooled then and like doesn't ever get to be socialized out in the world, really. So she's she ends up being this kind of like isolated adult who's very shy. She's socially awkward. She doesn't necessarily feel complete as a person. And any 23 year old person would feel this way.

Yes. But the way that they resolve it for Emilyelie is just like come on right because so she's also like sort of take a night class amelie so this transfers to adulthood where she's still but she has a job now she's out in the world she's a waitress at a cafe but she's still kind of a loner she doesn't relate well with other people and she's also sort of prone to flights of fancies she's a very whimsical oh yeah her thing is she's like i don't like sex but what i love is contaminating food with my hands there's all these tight shots of amelie just dipping her paws into open bags of grain i'm like like, that's someone's food. You can't do that. The sexual politics of this movie,

and we can get into this later as well, the sexual politics of this movie are very all over the place where it's, for better or worse, it's usually pretty clear where a movie falls on sex of whether it's being demonized or whether it's being very pro-sex.

But this movie's kind of all over the place where it's being demonized or whether it's being like very pro sex but this movie is kind of all over the place where it's not it's not critical of amelie for not being interested in sex but there is something about the way that sex is portrayed in this movie that does feel a little bit i don't think prudish is the word but something adjacent to that well we can like yeah dig into that but yeah the way that sex is treated in this movie is weird and also i think is something that i was very responsive to as a 14 year old in the back brace of like i don't need to have sex i can just you know put my hand in someone's food and come that way i can't have orgasms from skipping rocks right i mean we we've got the we've got this is like one of the hallmark, like, not like the other girls.

Right. Yes. Yeah. Sorry, continue. So she's this, you know, kind of socially awkward. Like you sort of said, maybe not manic, but pixie dream girl in a sense. But don't worry, she's hot. She's very cute.

The story starts with her finding a little box in her bathroom that a little boy had left 40 years earlier it is like a period piece to an extent not a lot not only a few years removed from when it came out but there is this through line of the movie where it takes place just as princess die passes away you can't say die dies that's just makes it seem like you're making a joke which we would never uh it's not so princess night passes away during this movie and that was another i was like that was definitely a choice that i'm not quite sure why that was the choice but interesting well it was a catalyst of her she finds out about this she drops uh like the lid to her perfume or something like that. It rolls across the floor and unwedges this hiding spot, basically, where this little box was. And she digs it out.

And she's like, oh, it's this little boy left all of his little toys and tokens and treasures behind. So she's like, hmm, I'm going to find out who this belonged to. I'm going to return it to him. And if he's moved by it, I'm actually going to be a do-gooder from now on so she sort of like takes on this project and she starts to figure out who this person might be and in so doing she runs into this man named nino who also is a bit of a manic tricks tricksy manic manic tricksy tricksyrixie. Like half of the cast of this movie is just like, yeah, this is a vague, cartoony. Wow. I mean, it almost reads as a fairy tale, this movie, to me.

It does. There's that guy with hollow bones. Oh, yeah. I did forget about old hollow bones. Yeah, old bird bones. Anyway, so she comes across this guy who's like rummaging around under this photo booth in a subway station. And they kind of make eyes at each other. And they're like, oh, this guy comes back later.

Because as she starts like doing her do-goodery, she comes in contact with him again in this scene where he's trying to return something to someone else. And then he loses a book. And she picks up this book. So she's like, I have to return something to someone else and then he loses a book and she picks up this book. So she's like, I have to return this book to him. And it's full of all of these discarded photographs that people have taken at these photo booths. So he has this hobby, I guess,

of finding these thrown away, ripped up photos, putting them in a photo album and then it makes him cum. I don't know why he does this. But we have to assume he jerks off to it. Yeah, 100 don't know why he does this but we have to assume yeah 100 he's right there's no basket of food the texture of the page you're like this book is being come on all the time fine right so then she sort of orchestrates this whole thing to get the book back to him but because she's so shy she can't actually meet him in real life

meanwhile he like there's like hints that she's falling in love with him even though she doesn't know who he is or they've never spoken and then also he loves her back you see her like throbbing heart the second she sees him it's like love at first sight which automatically when i was 14 i was like oh but now i'm just like like i'm gonna launch myself through a pane of glass especially with that thing with her dad in her heart earlier it's just kind of like oh yeah i was like that's a callback to when your dad touched you that's not good that didn't even register for me but yeah that's not good her her relationship with and that is like another,

that's like something that is kind of, I feel like dropped in the movie where at the beginning, there's a lot of, like, I think if you saw the first 10 minutes of this movie, you would think that this would be, this movie would have a lot to do with Amelie's relationship to her father

because you learn about Amelie's father before you even learn about her. You hear his whole life story. Then you hear a little bit about her mom, not as much because it's a movie. We can't be talking about women too much. And then you hit the plot point where it's like daddy never touched. And again, the translation might be funky. We don't know.

But there was like a line that was basically like, like every six year old girl, Amelie wanted to be hugged by her daddy more than anything in the world and right that is like such a strongly worded statement that you feel like it would come back more but the dad is kind of dropped in the movie event like where she sees him a lot it's clear that he is socially weird and doesn't quite know how to connect with her when she's an adult as well but it's it's not really like i was surprised that they put so much emphasis on that and at the very beginning of the movie and then he kind of disappears from the narrative and is replaced with a different older guy who's the

artist older guy yeah the guy with the hollow mr mr bird bones brittle bones which which kind of reminded me of shape of water was kind of i't know, that was a similar relationship of like young ingenue and artist who failing but has lots of exposition to say. But anyways. Yeah. Oh, also she has a dead mom. So she is like a Disney princess. This is a fairy tale. Her mom dies in a crazy way.

I did laugh. I forgot that her mom died like that. Because someone is trying to commit suicide by jumping off a building and lands on her mom killing her mom i think she was successful in the suicide but i don't think she meant to take out a mom first a suicidal fish and now this it's there's a lot of suicide at the first like 10 minutes of this movie which again sort of we don't come back to it right it's a weird tonal start there's i mean i think the film like i can't i just said film whoa no thank you i have i'm retired i just called it a film uh but the the visual consistency in this movie is pretty much across the board like it's a very this

whole movie was dipped in some very ornate piss like it's it's a very yellowy movie. It's a very sepia, romantic-looking movie. But tonally, the story is weird. You think it's going to be a movie about parents? Yeah, because, I mean, there's this voiceover throughout the whole thing, and it's, like, focusing on a lot of different things that really don't have anything to do with the story. All these subplots get introduced where...

So the main plot, which also doesn't even come up with the story all these subplots get introduced where so the main plot which also doesn't even come up in the story until maybe 40 or 45 minutes in where she needs to return this photo album to this guy so that becomes the main plot where she's orchestrating ways to get them to meet up again so that she can return it but she doesn't actually want to meet him because she like returns it from afar and then like she's also kind of chickening out because she's so shy that she can't meet this person and then she also orchestrates this thing where she's gonna help him solve the mystery of who this one particular person is in the photo album this bald guy who keeps popping up over

and over and it's like who's this guy right and she helps him figure it out so while all this is happening she's also helping some of her colleagues fall in love but is she helping them no she's interfering with people's lives and she literally sets her friend up with a scary criminal like i that that's the thing that okay but you know what no keep going she also like breaks and enters into this guy's house granted this guy is very mean oh I liked that but like she's like making key copies so that she can go into his house and fuck with all of his shit and like I like that yeah and then she's like encouraging her dad via this garden gnome to travel by like sending him she steals his gnome and then sends him photos of the gnome in other countries so she's yeah she's basically just like

trying to inspire people to be like better people but actually the twist is she's not a complete person herself like she's fixing other people's messes but but her own life is still a mess. And don't worry, there's a heavy handed painting metaphor that'll launch you into that. Maybe she's just here are some here are some things that we say at the painting. Maybe she's just different. She can't relate with other people. I just lost French. She has an absolute right to mess up her life. And then there's one point where

old bird bones is like is she in love it was like we have to stop talking at this painting right now they're yeah it's almost like an emma-ish austin-y like she's interfering a lot and not dealing with her own problems is what it becomes but it takes a while for us to get there right for i sort of forgot i'm like i forget exactly how far into the movie she actually it takes her to get the box to the guy and it was sooner than i thought and then the objective of the movie switches again to general meddling and then at the end it switches again to trapping nina in a relationship with her so they're like her objectives are always i mean it's always sort of to fill the void yeah is i guess the overarching thing but yeah like the specific objectives changes a couple different times there's not a ton of consistency i will

say that the the scene i forgot that because it used to make me cry in high school but it made me cry this time too of when he actually gets the box back and like has that flashback like that I that gets me every time but the scene with the marbles yeah well to launch us into the discussion so the movie ends with finally she's able to have a face-to-face with this guy Nino who she's been trying to connect with she catches him in a net she pulls him into her apartment and they start kissing even though they've never really spoken to each other and then the next scene is them like holding each other's naked bodies so it all worked out they got together because she traps him in her venus fly trap and they're in love this had a negative effect on how i my entire life so that's the end of the story and every and they're happy now they're so happy it worked to launch us into

the discussion all of her objectives starting from like finding whose box this belongs to helping her debt like they're all either to help a man or to help a female friend of hers get a man. Get a man. Yeah. Hard agree with that. At one point I wrote, Amelie is a guy's gal? I think that is to an extent true. And it's not that she's ever hostile or mean to the women in her life.

She isn't. But every character that we see her create a sustaining bond with in this movie is a man. You know, you can go to a character based, she was raised by her dad, basically. But she seems to connect easier with men where she hangs out with bird bones. She becomes very attached to Nino. Nino. Nino? Nino uh nino nino nino nino i keep saying nino yeah exactly uh but like everyone we see her connect with in a meaningful way is a man also uh lucien lucien oh lucien was my fucking favorite. I love Lucien. He's so adorable. So he's the character who worked,

he and this other guy, Calignon or whatever, the guy that she puts foot cream in his toothpaste. Yeah. I love that. They work together at a market and this older guy, Calignon, is very, very mean to Lucien

and insults him and berates him and all this stuff. We're great at friends. Yeah, Jamie's rubbing up on you. I love it. Lucien. Lucien, and insults him and berates him and all this stuff. We're great at friends. Yeah, Jamie's rubbing off on you. I love it. Lucien. Lucien. So Amélie helps Lucien by basically publicly humiliating his boss, who's just really awful. Who spirals into this manic state and becomes, it seems like, borderline suicidal in one scene.

I can tell you with certainty I have put foot cream on my teeth and I'm not, I don't need help with that. He loses his shit. He's like, someone's been in my home and then he can't put his shoes on anymore and he's vibrating and he's calling the

psychiatric association and it's just like Well that only happens because she plugs that number into his phone. He doesn't deliberately call that number. Oh, okay. She makes him think that she's basically gaslighting him because she's making him think that he's. She's gaslighting a lot of people. It's the most whimsical gaslighting. It really is.

Beautifully scored accordion music to this gaslighting. But that is how she approaches a lot of these situations where she goes. So there's this guy, a regular at her cafe, who is there to see one of her colleagues, Gina, because they used to date. His character's name is Joseph. Joseph. And he's got his eye on Gina. Meanwhile, Georgette, she works at the tobacco counter.

So Amelie's like, what if I set these two up instead? So she goes to Josephelie's like, what if I set these two up instead? So she goes to Joseph and she's like, can you see how much Georgette is like doing all this stuff to get your attention? Which she isn't. She's not.

She's just got like nasal spray. Right. And then she goes to Georgette and is like, don't you see how much Joseph is like always sitting so close to you? And then they have sex in a public space in the bathroom

that's very loud knocks all the glasses over in the cafe all the sex in this movie is very loud so yeah she's basically like manipulating everybody but it's it's okay because she's helping them that character joseph is to me i and i i vaguely remembered it i didn't remember the specifics of exactly how that story unfolds. That part, that really bugged me of like, he is actively stalking his ex-girlfriend every day. No one ever thinks to call someone, say, hey, seems like this guy might be dangerous. He's literally Unabomber carrying around a tape recorder and staring at his ex-girlfriend all day. And people are kind of mean to gina about it and they're like well it just just tell him to go away i'm

like this is not on her he's the one who has seemingly left his job to full-time stalk her and every time she does anything he's like what are you doing what are you doing are you you're fucking him like there's you know which i'm just like oh geez i've dated that guy i've i mean i used to date a guy who would show up at my work for my whole shift and just be like just keeping an eye on you and it's like nope uh we're married now yeah congrats uh you know he's stalking her yeah and then amelie goes over to him and i'm like oh did she tell him to fuck off like that, that'd be cool. But she doesn't. She's like, oh, let me just hook you up with my friend. This very stable guy who's always harassing my coworker.

Let me just hook him up with my other coworker like that. I'm just like. And then he starts harassing her, too. Like they have sex. But then they're like relationship goes sour. And then he's like doing the same thing over again. Which I'm glad at least that Georgette gets the fuck out of there. Because I was so worried that that would be like yeah the take because i forgot how that subplot ended but it was like oh yeah she does she does tell him to fuck off and then there's

that interesting and i thought this was an interesting um exchange between whoever that failed writer is who's always at the cafe miss suzanne who is the like brassy bartender lady and joseph uh georgette is like i'm done fuck off goodbye i've got to go you know raw dog a bottle of nasal spray or whatever she does uh but there's suzanne she says women need air and then joseph says you give women air they blow you off which is like he's a feminist icon but it was interesting to see like i feel like that was the point where the movie finally passed some decisive judgment on that character because before it was like oh this guy's like quirky and weird and we know he shouldn't be here but maybe he's just misguided and needs love and

it's like no this guy like needs help like he needs restraining orders filed against him to not be in this cafe 100 but the movie seemed like weirdly tolerant of his press and so finally by the end with that line i was like okay good now we can write him off as like the movie thinks this guy sucks i don't know why it took so long to reach that conclusion because it seems pretty obvious from moment one but i don't think that that would have been obvious to me the first time i saw this movie because that's like kind of just like an exaggerated cartoony version of like the chase narrative right of like just hang out yeah just hang out she's's yours. This whole movie is on the chase narrative. There's a scene with Nino

in the porn shop where he works where he's talking about how he loves Amelie because of the mystery and there's supposed to be that big contrast with the porn shop and it's just like, if you watch that as a teen, you're like yeah, the mystery is fucking great. And if you watch that now

it's just like, like no fucking buy me a vibrator it's right his colleague is actively like putting price tags on yeah she's like yeah her name is yeah her name is eva and she is she basically only provides exposition but i'm like i want to what does she do like yeah can we stop watching Amelie and watch whatever she's doing? She seems to be enjoying her life. There are a lot of female characters in this movie. There are. The way they're treated is all over the board.

But the characters that I found, and perhaps I've missed them, Amelie, Amelie's mom, Georgette, Madeline, the landlady, neighbor lady, who I have some things to say oh yeah uh Gina Madame Suzanne the newsstand lady yes does she have a name I never caught it okay maybe because French we didn't catch it but I couldn't find a name for her uh but she she's in a bunch of different scenes the video girl Eva there's at one point a stripper named samantha that nino tries to talk to but she's busy dancing in a box it's a whole thing and those are the ones that i there's one more that i caught uh philomene who is the flight attendant who helps oh yes amelie take pictures with her dad's gnome in other parts of the world amazing yes but she is basically like she's a tertiary character hardly has anything to do with the story most of these female characters exist

in relation to men or their primary objective or plot line has to do with getting a man which sucks a lot amelie's plot line is all over the place but it eventually settles on getting a man georgette she's basically coerced into yeah having a man and then leaves him which is like okay gina who i really like too and another character i felt was like underserviced yeah gina doesn't do anything wrong this entire movie she's very nice she's very tolerant of amelie being a weirdo but everyone is kind of always like gina's loose and i'm like no it's just because that guy joseph's always saying are you sleeping with him like she's not yeah she's and even if she is leave her alone oh yeah okay madeline madeline the neighbor weird subplot. Yeah.

So she's, I think, one of the first scenes in this movie that passes the Bechdel test. Yeah. It's the scene between Amelie. Spoiler alert, it does pass. But the scene between Amelie and Madeline, the neighbor. Amelie's trying to figure out who this box belongs to. And Madeline's like, hi, I'm Madeline. My husband died 40 years ago and it ruined my life and it's just like whoa coming in hot yeah she's still like devastated by it and it like consumes all of her energy but that's literally all we know about her and yeah we don't see her for a while

or we see her for like two seconds or whatever and then at the end we get like she she receives you know the letter from the letter from her husband saying, like, I love you and blah, blah, blah. And her the end beats of her character, she like makes out with a framed portrait of her dead husband. And I was like, oh, like, I don't know. That storyline confused me because didn't she already have letters from him, which we learn early on? She's like, yeah, but I don't think that they like said as explicitly like i love you i thought that was what i thought okay her issue was like it's all about his day or whatever okay oh i see okay yeah yeah it's it's supposed to be amelie providing closure but what it ends up is amelie keeping the myth of this 40 year dead guy alive for this poor woman.

Fueling the fire. Yeah. Like extended, especially if fast forward like six months and Madeline finds out the letter was fake. Oh, yeah. That's going to result in some serious psychological consequences so that was that was like one of the female characters that i felt was like most disservice and just felt like not even underwritten but just like that was a choice that i don't know right without but that was a choice because there are so many subplots that you think one of them might be oh amelie's helping this person reconnect with a friend yeah or amelie's

helping she does kind of again do they not have night classes in france do they not have Emily's helping this person reconnect with a friend. Yeah. Or Emily's helping. She does kind of. Again, do they not have night classes in France? Do they not have paint night in France? There's plenty of things you can do with your time that aren't actively sabotaging the lives of others in a very twee way with banks. Yeah. And helping people and interfering with people's lives always as it relates to men. So, like, I feel like if she did want to, like, be this do-gooder who's helping people, great.

So maybe volunteer at a food bank. Maybe, like, go to an animal shelter and pet some dogs. Don't grab the nearest blind person and start shouting at them. And she didn't even know where he was going. She just leads him. She drops him off at the train station. And then she's like, okay, I'll leave you here. And then he was like, where? I am blind. didn't even know where he was going. She just leads him. Did you drop him off at the train station? And then she's like, okay, I'll leave you here. And then he was like,

where? I am blind. I don't know where I am. I do want to point out, though, that speaking, I mean, animals, she does have a cat and that cat

most likely has eight nipples. This has been cat sex with Caitlin. Unless one has been added or subtracted, which we don't know. You know,

Amelie is so full of whimsy that she might have just put an extra nipple on her cat. I think she's so whimsical she may have just amputated one. She may have just made a necklace out of cat nipples. And sold it on. Yeah. You know, Amelie is just like, if someone breathed life into Etsy.com. Yeah. There she is.

She is Etsy.com so i will life i think you might be able to write off the fact that so much of her motivation and her decisions and actions are based around like romantic pursuits either for herself or helping other people because again like this is sort of a fairy tale so it's going to be this like oh a romantic narrative with all of these romantic subplots and stuff like that but like i don't know there's just it's also it doesn't have to be exclusively that because there's so many other characters and so many other either like fully fledged subplots or just sort of like story beats that relate to whatever character. It could be her helping a fellow woman take her driver's license test. Like, why is it always like, oh, I have to set you up with a man or I have to do.

It's always just it's so focused on either helping men or helping women get men. And if you can conceive of a suicidal fish, you can probably come up with problems that aren't about men. Yeah, exactly. That's a great yardstick. She has a vivid imagination. Like, you would think that she'd be able to, like, transcend just helping people find a boyfriend. Right. talk about how especially with this story where she is trying to get nino and her to cross paths but not really because she keeps chickening out but all the measures that she goes through to

orchestrate this is okay so she like gets him to come to this park thing she calls a pay phone he gets on the phone and she's like follow the blue arrows and then he runs and follows the arrows i swear to god score this scene differently and it's fucking scorsese it's like cape fear she's gonna kill him she's wearing sunglasses she's gonna kill him it's not good like it's just it's bad but then on top so he follows the arrows and then he comes up to this man who is dressed as a statue pointing at something so she apparently paid a person like a street performer to like waitress there on a waitress in this economy oh why i guess maybe a little bit post clintoninton boom. It was a child, too.

Like, a child is less terrifying to you to talk to than this guy. All right, because then she also pays a kid to be like, hey, make sure you look at what the guy's pointing at. So she pays someone to dress up as a statue and then point at some binoculars. And then she apparently also pays a kid to tell him where to look in case he's an idiot, which he is. So then he runs up and he looks through the binoculars and then he sees her returning his book then she figures out who this mystery person is who keeps appearing in his photo album turns out he's a repairman for these photo booths so she also wants rather than just like meeting nino and saying like hey um let's go for

a drink and then on their date they say hey you know that person that was like in all of your photos, that bald guy? I actually figured out who he was. It's just the repairman. Instead of doing that, which would have been so much easier, she orchestrates a whole other thing where she deliberately breaks a photo booth and then tells him where to go so that he can so that nino can find it's a lot yeah i will say i just made some connections to something that i recently did in my personal life that could be perhaps traced back to no because you already know and it's really embarrassing okay but like all i had to say if we are to look at Amelie as a movie that is directed at primarily young women, which I don't think it's unreasonable to say. I think that that's probably who the movie stuck with the most, for sure.

Especially if it's like shy, young women. This is not a responsible blueprint to present young women with uh in terms of just like you gotta do like it looks you know it's visually interesting shout out to the accordions but the yeah like saying like if you're a young woman who's uncomfortable approaching romantic partners that you should instead gaslight them half to death destroying your own personal life in the process and that will achieve you a free ride on a moped like that's patently untrue and and watching it unfold was it's interesting because it is you know that romantic subplot is not subtle but the way it unfolds is so like there's so many red flags that we just

blaze past them and because we love amelie and we love bangs uh and so yeah there are moments where i'm like we should the movie should be passing a little bit of judgment on her right now but it's that's never gonna happen and again i think you can chalk this up to it being so whimsical and fairy tale like that you can't really take it that seriously it's you know I think you can chalk this up to it being so whimsical and fairytale-like that you can't really take it that seriously. I think you're supposed to just walk away from this being like, oh, what a fun fairytale-like story. But for young women who are watching this who might not make that connection because their 14-year-old brains haven't fully developed, they're going to be like, wow, look how, oh my God, love. You're just supposed to do all these grand gestures, and then a

boy will like me. And one, it's extremely heteronormative. Every relationship in this movie is an extremely white movie. There's one, okay, there's one point where a lesbian hits on Amelie and she is terrified. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, there, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's not even that like she's being friendly it's not like a i feel like yeah i feel like the the way that that scene is like filmed and like continually cutting back to a horrified audrey tend to like yeah because that is a pretty innocuous interaction that could be interpreted as friendliness. But the way it's filmed is like, oh, a gay person in France. Like, yeah, obviously a gay person in France. Idiot. Well, then, so, like, I feel like this movie depicts Paris the way that a lot of movies depict New York City.

And it's like, oh, only white people here. Even though Paris is a very diverse city. Yes. here even though paris is a very diverse city yes so it's great like i just remember that scene in the beginning where uh the voiceover the narration is like amelie likes to amuse herself with silly questions like oh i wonder how many people are having orgasms right now and then it's like all these quick cuts of all the people who are like straight white couples having sex yeah and a lot of ages and body types but but all straight white couples. Yes.

And I was just like, wow, so much diversity in Amelie. Can we talk about the use of narration in this movie? Sure. Quick. Because a lot of it bothers me. I think that a very simple choice that could have been made, give us a female narrator. Why did the narrator of this movie who talk about fucking lazy writing but like why why was it a man like why is there a man talking over half of this movie that is a woman's story because that makes it seem like it's coming from a male

perspective even though the main character of the story is a woman that really bothered me on this view because i forgot how much of it there is as and again it's like a weird thing that i'm like did this at what point did this movie change hands in terms of who wrote it because the the the top half of this movie is so heavy in voiceover narration yeah especially like the first half hour where there's not even a lot of dialogue. There's like a setup through the voiceover and then like two lines of dialogue to punctuate the scene and then we for that to i agree i just go away i agree but the thing that bugs it it was i felt like it was too much especially because a lot of the exposition were given at the beginning of the movie doesn't really have a lot of bearing yeah on the rest of the movie like yeah the first 10 minutes about her dad's touching of her or the lack thereof which they really drill into you. And then, but why,

you know, but yeah, really simple choice that could have been made. Give us a female narrator would have made more sense. Yeah. The first 30 minutes of this movie is kind of like a series of okay. Cupid profiles. It's just like,

and you're just like, what questions were you asking? And okay. Cupid does ask those questions. I never fucked with OkCupid. I was a big OkCupid head. There is a question on OkCupid that is, would you be okay with making dolphin noises for your partner? Like, get any more specifics? Yeah. I mean, the person who wrote that question has a dolphin noise thing, and that's fine, but that's very specific.

Yeah, that's way too specific. I would do it in public, but I wouldn't do it in a... Well, no one asked me. No one's ever asked me that question. But if that were to come up, I'll make a dolphin noise if we're at a Walmart. Well, back to a point I was trying to make and never got there a while ago. I'm sorry. It's quite all right.

Oh, my God. I probably distracted myself. Oh, my God. You're all under arrest now. Oh, my God. But I was saying, like, you can chalk this up to this movie being a fairy tale. So, like, the depiction of romantic love isn't going to be very realistic. But the fact that you see these two characters fall in love without even ever knowing each other.

There's actually very reminiscent of Snow White, our recent episode on that movie, where Snow White decides she likes Prince Charming, even though their only interaction had been him scaring her and her running away and then them sort of singing each other. An iconic meet cute. Right. I climbed over your wall and then I sung to you. Like this. My one song. One song.

I have but one song. But then he also mysteriously loves her, even though, again, they've never interacted. Hot. So I just think it's irresponsible to keep making romantic stories that are reminiscent of these fairy tales that depict romantic love so horribly and so unrealistically. It's like, why do we keep doing this granted this was

17 years ago that this movie came out but yeah and ultimately i mean something that does bug me about this movie is that after all this where amelie does grow as a character outside of her romantic self where she does like learn to connect with people in a way she hadn't before she gets a little bit more confident in herself she's a little bit less shy she you know has more like she does come into her own to an extent but then it just becomes like and because she did all that she has a boyfriend now and making that seem like the end game of like working on yourself is like oh fuck like yeah the reward is a man right where the truth is the reward is you have to just keep doing that forever to work on yourself and then one day there's no more work to be done because you've passed away

i think you can look at it like that and you can also look at it like her pursuit of a man is what fixed her like she she didn't bother to do any of this stuff until she decided oh i have to try to meet this man and that's what is making me a whole complete person exactly exactly yeah and then she's trying to do that for other people too, to various results. Even though they did not ask for her help. They did not want it. And it ends up fucking with them. Like poor, who knows when Georgette's going to be able to trust again.

Right. Honestly. I bet she's not on OkCupid right now. She deleted her profile. She's already a hypochondriac. He threw a very nervous person into a toxic situation knowingly. Not smart.

Not good. There's that exchange between Georgette and the newsstand lady where the newsstand lady says, a woman without love wilts like a flower without sun.

I was like, oh, God. I feel ill. Feminist icon newsstand lady. i just nodded so vigorously my headphones that was just i don't and and that was like a not like a number of topics in this movie i'm like where does the movie actually fall on that i it's unclear because for some characters it seems like oh fuck that but then with amelie you know her reward for self-improvement is love and so and dudes in amelie's life seem to imply that at some point it will be quote-unquote too late for

her and it's chill she's 23 she's yeah once they said it through some sort of exposition that she's 23 i was like oh wow why are we worrying what's okay um? Bitch, I'm 31. Oh, my God. Caitlin's new catchphrase. Bitch, I'm 31. Bitch, I'm 31. I wanted to explore, I hinted at this earlier, but why this movie might have been able to cross over into American audiences, whereas most foreign films don't. I was trying to remember what I learned about French cinema

and I don't remember a lot, so apologies and I should have researched this more. What I do remember is the main difference between a lot of American cinema and a lot of foreign cinema in general is that American cinema is very structured and formulaic whereas a lot of French and then just other cinema from other countries that are not the U.S., those narratives, I think, tend to be

not quite so structured and not quite so like rigidly formulaic. So I think one of the reasons that this movie was able to cross over and then it does resemble sort of like the love story fairy tales and like the whimsical romance that american audiences love but again i wish i had remembered more or read more about it so if you are a connoisseur of french cinema feel free to tweet at us and let me know what i'm fucking up about it. But yeah, I just thought that that was interesting that this is one of the few non-English speaking movies that crossed over. Yeah, and it was a big hit. It had a $10 million budget, grossed $174.2 million. Wow.

Big ol' hit. So it was a hit when it came out. I think that perhaps, and I truly know very little about international cinema. I'm not even going to hazard a guess, but it was associated with a company called Miramax that I'm sure was

a feminist icon, Miramax, a feminist icon, Harvey Weinstein, a feminist icon, Bob Weinstein, you know, the whole bit. But I think that that association, and this was like peak miramax like chicago 2002 is about to come out baby wow that shit so uh so i think that there was probably some sort of push but in terms of narrative yeah i mean american people respond to unrealistic love stories all the time yeah all the time and also i think that there is like a francophile thing that

factors into it like it's a it's a weird love hate relationship where people are my dad says starbucks is french but also i was obsessed with amelie when i was a teenager partially because france because france there's a there's a really great uh comedian New York named Ruby McAllister who has this great bit about how obsessed teenage girls are with France because of the romance that it implies. And like, you know, like the looping and the whole bit where I know girls who dropped out of Spanish class and took French because of this movie. Yeah. because of this movie yeah like this i mean i feel like french culture plus american teenage girls equals wet moisture that's what it boils down to aristotle's gonna kill himself he's upset can i just say that i wish that the inciting incident instead of princess dies death i wish it had been amelie seeing on the television a trailer for titanic and that's because that was 97 yeah that's what made her drop

the thing and that's how she found the box i think princess dies death was one of the first memories i ever like clearly remember my mom weeping yeah when that happened and my brother being there and a very tiny baby and he was probably weeping too because he was a baby not because he was a big fan of princess time but I I'm interested in and I I have truly no context I tried to do some research on what the motivation was because this movie came out no one but it's set in 1997 in like the two weeks and they give you the dates even like they they're repeating the they're repeating dates and i i am not sure like the way they talk about princess die there's one point where bird bones gets pissed off at lucienne and goes princess d princess d and i'm just like why is he

pissed off about princess di i'm like does it have to do with like the death of an icon the death of a beautiful woman i feel like is referenced at one point where the newsstand lady says something about like oh isn't it so sad she was so beautiful young and beautiful and then amelie is like oh would it have been okay if she was old and ugly? And then the newsstand lady. Turns out it's not a feminist icon. Because she's like, yeah, look at Mother Teresa. Like, as if, like, it's fine if she died because she was old.

Right. She old and she looks like shit. Is what she's saying. Yeah. I say Mother Teresa hot. Anyway. Anyways. Yeah, that was something that I totally forgot was a part of the narrative.

But it does. It comes up over and over. It is the inciting incident of the movie to an extent. And I couldn't exactly put my finger on why. I'd be curious to know what the answer to that is. And pair that with this artificial clock that some people are putting on Amelie. Yeah. I wonder if it's something to do with that. And I don't know where it's like, oh, if you don't do something now with your life, you might die in a car crash when you're young. Yeah. Is that like, I don't know.

But also it's like, well, you better find a guy now. And that worked out well for Princess Di. I don't know yeah it's it's it's kind of all over the place yeah now i have to go home and watch a 12-hour documentary about princess die again which i've done before i'll do it again she's an icon whatever great beanie baby loved the immemorial baby yeah iconic beanie baby yeah if only all of our lives could be boiled down into one iconic beanie baby yeah i'm gonna start designing my memorial beanie baby now mine would be paddington to the beanie baby bear perfect yep i don't even know mine's just gonna

be a bean bag with a little sad face and Sharpie. Do you remember those stuffed animals that like, they were so big in the 90s. You open them up and there's a bunch of little ones inside them. So you're like performing a C-section on these stuffed animals. Am I making this up? I swear to God, I remember this. I don't remember. That's horrifying.

We can expand. There's Velcro. What kind of animals? Was it like different species? There were dogs and like unicorns and you'd open them up and there were a bunch of little ones inside. Is it that they were giving birth? I guess. I don't know.

I can relate to a couple of years ago. There were these free app games that I found just because i was like trolling the app store and there were like all these off-brand app games where you could give a c-section to like the characters in frozen and it was just whoa there's some of the wild i wonder if they're still online because they were straight up you were giving like what appeared to be a pretty realistic c-section where you would sedate princess elsa she's extremely pregnant it's crazy you can give a c-section to the snowman and a human white baby boy comes out no matter what you do you give the snowman a c-section he's pregnant with a caucasian man it's the wild man the way we i'm sorry i don't know that's my memorial stuffed

animal though for sure i want my memorials uh to be an app where you could give me a suggestion but it looks very realistic if it turns out this is not a memory and just something psychologically terrible about me no i believe you i swear everyone if anyone's still playing the frozen c-section game at me on twitter i forget the name of it i'm afraid of what will happen if i search frozen c-section online so i'm not gonna do that but if you remember the name of the game i'm pretty sure it was free i'm pretty sure that it was like one of those apps where you could tell they had like photoshopped a lot of like i it looked too real it looked too and the baby comes out baby's covered in goop and then and then you gotta put a crown on it because it's royalty i because they're princesses i checked out as soon as you said frozen c-section because that just sounds like the aisle at the grocery store where like the frozen seafood is this is gonna derail my fucking day i have

i have things i have to do and now i now i have to start playing the frozen c-section game again all right well let's uh get back on track to amelie is there any final thoughts anyone has about the movie? As far as Amelie as a character and her character development, I think it's better than a lot of movies we see. Because we at least have a very clear understanding of what her personality is like. We know a lot of her quirks. We know a lot of her backstory. We see her and her personality having an effect on the story and having an effect on the decisions she makes and how she approaches things um a lot of movies don't bother to develop

their female characters enough where we would see stuff like that so i actually i think her character development is better than a lot of movies we've seen but because the bar is so low that doesn't necessarily mean that the character development is superb right but i think it's and maybe this is like it has to do with it not being cut and dry kind of boring american movie that it is like what we that we do see changes in amelie we don't see her go from flawed to unflawed, which for a story about a 23-year-old woman makes sense. Like at the end, she's not going to be like, I've figured it out.

I'm good. So in that way, it's like, okay, cool. But yeah, the way that the story, the place they leave us with self-improvement equals boyfriend eventually, it just is like not good uh we hinted that the movie does pass the bechdel test she does have a lot of conversations with the other female characters like suzanne and georgette and gina the first melody the first

time i noticed it passing was with her mom oh yes because she's teaching her some grammar lessons and stuff like that yes a lot of the conversations are about men or men get mentioned in them but because of our version of the test where it just has to be a two-line exchange between two women and a man is not mentioned there are several of those tons of the conversations in this movie between women. A man will get mentioned, or the whole conversation is about a man. So it does not necessarily pass super handily if you're comparing conversations about men to not. It was more isolated incident than I would have thought. Yes.

Yeah, especially if the movie was so many women in it. At one point, is it Gina gina and georgette lean in to have a conversation and uh joseph speaks into his tape recorder blatant female conspiracy happening yeah that was just like the perfect encapsulation right joseph i mean i the joseph plot line for me is by far the worst part of this movie yeah oh god i just hate especially when movies are directed at teenage girls, I just feel like uber sensitive to like, oh, you're just telling them all the wrong things here

and it takes too long for the movie to pass judgment on it. It bugs me. Yeah. Yeah. I think also the reason, one of the reasons the movie doesn't pass the test better is that, and we already touched on this,

but like she has female acquaintances and colleagues but no real female friendships that we see all of her kind of close friendships are either with the guy with brittle bones her pal lucien at the market her dad like all of the more meaningful relationships she has are all with men so yeah she's a guy's gal she's a guy's gal so when she is talking to women it's usually because she's tricking them into thinking a random creep at the coffee shop that they work at likes her so that's frustrating so amelie holds up better than i would have thought. I definitely think she could have benefited from a female friend. I don't know exactly why we had to kill her mom other than that's a funny, like the jokey way that they kill her off.

But it's like, OK, great. But that has such huge consequences on the story that it's like that can't just be like a random decision that's made. That never really comes up again. Yeah, that doesn't pay off yeah like that's never referenced after it just it just becomes like well that's why there's no mom and that's and her dad is probably more introverted than he was before um shall we rank let's rank let's rate um we've got our nipple scale zero to five nipples based on its portrayal of women. I'm going to land somewhere around a two or a two and a half. Because it's a fairy tale, I think that you could use that to excuse a lot of the things that happen and a lot of the choices that are made, such as the super unrealistic portrayal of romantic relationships.

Yeah. But I'm tired of using that as an excuse because it turns out fairy tales don't treat women well. And fairy tales do not, like, prepare you for a healthy life. Right. You remember that Disney princess roast we did where we realized both of our characters are, oh, just horrible things happen to them,

and we have no personality to build on. There's nothing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you were Snow White and I was Cinderellaerella and we were both at an extreme disadvantage we had nothing we had the oldest movies so we had just no personality no we looked great though oh of course that's what's important i'm sorry it's all these fairy tales i took in as a child right so there's that but she does have she has agency although she goes to very extreme lengths to get what she wants we didn't touch on this that much but i do want to just acknowledge that i feel like

mental illness is treated in a very weird way yeah in this movie to the to the point where i don't i wouldn't even know how to approach that discussion because it's not spoken about at all but there's some like indications we see of it that are sort of either dismissed as quirky or i don't know there it was just like a very uncanny it didn't i think that's why i had such a bad reaction to it actually now that you're saying that like people are simultaneously fetishizing and chastising amelie's mental illness yeah and fucking dudes who would suggest you watch Amelie will probably do that.

To you? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's exactly why. It's not really Amelie that I have a problem with. It's the same way like a manic pixie dream girl character, fine, but that reflects on so much. Exactly, yeah. The people who are drawn to and exploit,

yeah, it's not. That's why it becomes the responsibility of filmmakers and storytellers that if you do want to tell a story about a character like that, you have to frame them in a way that, like, then you don't have these fucking idiots who are watching this being like, oh, I think you would like, you should watch it because you should. Like, it's their responsibility to, like, responsibly frame characters and frame mental illness and things like that so that the viewer gets the right message. Right. And it is, like, when a guy does say, oh, you'd love Amelie, they're making a specific comment about how they view you. And it is not actually very complimentary. So as someone who has received a similar like oh you probably would love that i was like um fuck off my favorite movie is doubt you can fuck right off to hell so yeah i think i'm gonna i'm gonna go with a two nipple rating because even though she

her character development is decent, all of her motivations and all of her friendships and pretty much her entire world is centered around male characters. And she is interested in self-improvement. Or maybe it's not even sure if she is or not. That's what ends up happening. But it's hard to say if that's an actual goal of hers. But that happens because a man helps her get there. And then the reward of her, like, fixing herself a little bit is a man.

So I think not watching it through the Bechdel cast lens, I think the movie does hold up for a movie that came out in 2001 better than we expected. But when we are looking at it through this lens it's not great so that's why it's a two nipples from me i'm gonna give my nipples one goes to the cat whose name we never find out oh so if she speaks to the cat it cannot pass the bechdel test uh and then the other nipple i'm gonna give it to gina amelie's colleague in the cafe, because I think she was robbed a bit by the narrative. More could have happened with her. There's potential for that to be a better situation,

better character, better storyline, what have you. I guess I'll go two as well. We always go the same, but two does sound right for this. We're just always on the same page, Jamie. We're just so in love. Which is the reward we got for working on ourselves.

But yeah, I'd give it two as well. Because it's like with Amelie, we do, like you're saying, she does make progress as a person. That is nice to see. The progress is a result of her own choices for the most part she she does have a lot of agency i just think that this movie is kind of uh harmful in that it can be used as a blueprint for some not so healthy interpersonal behaviors for young people as a young person who did like ape this behavior yeah i don't like it i don't like the way that it treats mental illness i don't like the way it treats gina uh i'm gonna give one of my nippies to lucien because i really love him and i'm gonna give my other nippy to princess di rest in paradise oh yeah two nipples great omelie 2001

uh i'm gonna bisect a nipple right in half and give it two and a half nipples. Yeah, I'm giving one nipple to, I think, Gina, too. She deserves better. She does. In every way. People are endorsing her being stalked, which is just, it's someone in the comedy community, not fun to watch. And then there's that, and then, is it Eva?

Oh, who works at the sex shop. Oh, yeah, sex shop. Oh, she's cool, yeah. Definitely giving her a nipple. And half n is it Eva? Oh, who works at the sex shop? Oh, yeah, sex shop. Oh, she's cool. Definitely giving her a nipple. And half nipple goes to Amelie. Well, there you go, gang. We did it. We did France.

The Backstall cast conquers France. Hannah, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Where can people follow you online? What would you like to plug? I would like to plug a book I wrote with Alex Führer who loves Amelie. Alex.

But it's called Mom Presents I Think These Guys Are Hot Stuff and it's like kind of a cross between like a Christmas letter from a mom to her daughter and Maxim Magazine or like a playgirl. It's so funny. It was really fun to write.

The reason we wrote it is because we were walking from a Target and we saw a guy who was just buying tissues and energy drinks. And so we had to write about this guy. And then it just became a series of profiles of weird dudes. Amazing. And you can follow me on Twitter at Hannah Michaels, which is spelled H-A-N-A-M-m-i-c-h-e-l-s i'm ungoogleable but good luck well we'll help people find you don't worry we'll help people find you and then they can show up at the cafe every single day with their tape recorder hey yay You can follow the Bechdel cast

on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You can go to our website, bechdelcast.com. You can tweet at us. You can email us.

You can buy our merch. You can subscribe to our Patreon, which is $5 a month, and it gets you two extra bonus episodes that no one else can get unless you're a matron.

Yes, queen. And you can ignore the harmful messages that movies like Amelie send out that you're just gonna fall in love with someone who you've never actually

met or spoken with but because you're both a little whimsical you're actually destined to be together. Instead, I say you should become a woman in STEM by downloading

the C-section app. And you're basically a surgeon. You're halfway there. True. Well, thanks for being here, Hannah. I have a few surgeries to clock in tonight. But thanks for listening, gang. Au revoir.

Au revoir. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unnerves the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, this week we're taking it to the next level. The one, the only, Catherine Hahn is joining us on Las Culturistas. That's right, the queen of comedy herself.

Get ready for a conversation that's as hilarious as it is insightful. Tune in for all the laughs, the stories, and of course, the culture. Don't miss Catherine Hahn on Las Culturistas. Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career.

That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.