Amelie is my favourite film ever. Watching it is like being wrapped in a weighted blanket with a hot chocolate. It’s my comfort watch and I relate to the character of Amelie Poulain but I never understood why until fairly recently.
For me now, Amelie is a representation of an autistic female who masks, and who I can relate to.
Here is why I think Amelie Poulain is autistic:
Amelie’s only friend as a child was her goldfish and she has an imaginary friend.
As a child she was accused of causing an accident by using her instamatic camera. She took this literally, but got her revenge when she realised she had been fooled.
Noticing tiny details, images in clouds as a child and tiny details in films as an adult.
Sensory differences including enjoying putting her hand in sacks of grain. Throughout the film, there are various points where sound and light are distorted.
Amelie likes picking up stones and skimming them, could be considered stimming.
Amelie’s special interest is people and helping people, and she goes to great lengths to do this- including finding the owner of the tin of possessions she finds in her flat.
Amelie appears to have alexithymia. She communicates a lot of her emotions via “the girl with the glass of water” in the Renoir painting that her neighbour Raymond Dufayel is copying. Raymond describes her as “in the middle, yet she’s outside”. Amelie uses her to communicate her feelings about Nino. When Amelie sees Nino in the cafe where she works and thinks she has blown it, she turns into a puddle of water.
Nino appears to have autistic traits too. He collects discarded photographs from photo booths and keeps these in an album. When Amelie finds and tries to return the album at his work (a sex shop and striptease), she finds out he also likes recording laughs. There is some evidence to suggest that autistic people are more likely to have autistic partners, so their connection makes perfect sense.
Amelie sets Nino a number of tasks to get his photo album back and win her heart. This could be to figure out if he was like her, or to make sure they were compatible as it is suggested earlier in the film that previous attempts at sex and relationships had been disappointing. It could also be because she struggles to communicate how she feels, so does this in very practical terms. The mystery of the man who appears in lots of sets of photos is also solved on the way.
Spoiler alert, it has a happy ending. Amelie gets her lover, who is just as much of an outsider as she is.
My ADHD PhD 