God, it has been said, is in the details. Certainly one would have to be God to fully appreciate all the unique particulars and odd juxtapositions of existence. The fly who lands at a particular street corner, the wind blowing the cloth on an empty table at a particular outdoor restaurant. The particular sperm and egg that, against incomperable odds, meet to make one Amelie.

Amelie of Montmartre is a rare individual, one with the extremely rare gift for seeing all the odd little details that everybody else misses. The purest example of the exercise of her gift in the film titled by her name is when she grabs the arm of a blind man and walks him down the street, noting rapid-fire the peculiar particulars of the locale that even people with eyes to see don't catch. With charming panache, Amelie opens the blind man's eyes.

Just as this film does for us, in the hands of a French director, one Jean-Pierre Juenet, who shares Amelie's rare gift. Juenet's two best earlier films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, have become cult classics, with their breathtaking alien visions straight out of Terry Gilliam or David Lynch -- only more exquisitely conceived, choreographed and controlled than either of these two directors who are obvious influences.

With his familiar soaring camerawork, choreographed seamlessly with motion and mise en seine, Juenet grabs viewers by the arm and reels off a wondrous catalog of simple pleasures, and the cumulative affect is to reveal the wonder of each individual. "Even artichokes have hearts," says one character, and we see that among details we miss is the peculiar goodness of each other.

As a child, Amelie came to believe her actions controlled events around her; as an adult she finds reason to confirm this theory. Quite by accident, she discovers a little boy's long lost treasure, and tracks down the owner so many years later, restoring a lost part of himself and filling her with a strange feeling of absolute harmony and a desire to help mankind. She starts to tinker with reality to improve upon it, slyly whispering suggestions and fulfilling people's secret dreams.

Amelie plays subversive matchmaker in the cafe where she works. She impishly grants her father a vicarious dream come true. To the fragile little painter, Raymond, who never leaves his apartment she sends videos of upsetting absurdities, like the footage of a horse blundering right into the Tour de France.

Amelie's discreet string-pulling is never shown as sinister, though she is as capable of punishing as well as granting wishes, as the mean grocer who is blind to his own unique son discovers.

Less like a puppetmaster than a touch-up artist, Amelie adds little brush strokes to her world, just like Raymond. But also also like him, she does not really get out: despite her seeming ability to fix other people's lives, she is unable to make her own dreams come true. Then she runs into one more overlooked odd detail in life, Nino, who shares Amelie's gift for seeing, and so they discover one another, though the process takes awhile.

Raymond paints the same picture over and over, trying get the expression on one particular subject just right. Amelie part of the same vision director Juenet has presented us before, though this film is not a matter of going over the same material.

Indeed, there's a sense in which Juenet has already painted his vision perfectly. City of Lost Children was a masterpiece of cinematic grotesquerie delicately balanced with childlike wonder. No doubt that delicate balance was in part due to the creative balance in that film with production designer Marc Caro, who shared an unprecedented above-the-title credit as co- director. In Amelie, the sense of Otherness is less self- contained or as controlled, in part because this film was shot on location instead of a soundstage, also explainable in part perhaps because of the absence of Caro -- though the look and feel is close enough to their collaborative efforts most viewers won't see much difference. Likewise, Amelie, despite the love of unconventional details, takes a more direct narrative route than Juenet's previous work, and finally resolves itself into a boy-meets-girl sort of film. That element skirts the built-in problem of films in which the meeting is postponed for most of the movie (e.g. Sleepless in Seattle, though the constellation of peculiarities here is rich enough to keep us satisfied with an atmosphere for which plot is mere excuse.

If Jeunet is the fragile little painter, or even Amelie, one hopes he, too, is able to use his visionary gift to find happiness himself that he's been able to share with others. He's got an advantage over many people, in both his gift for seeing, and in seeing this odd detail: the Otherness we crave must ultimately, despite the risk, find expression in human relationship.