Consuming Nostalgia in Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain

Widely heralded as a nostalgic film, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain is a twenty-first-century version of the Proustian madeleine, which has become a symbol of the relationship between food and memory. Jeunet uses distinctly French foods and culinary spaces to produce a uniquely nostalgic rendering of Paris. The filmmaker harnesses the deep cultural significance of the nation’s gastronomic tradition as a means of national self-fashioning, crafting a film that is emblematic of the widespread narrative use of gastronomy at the turn of the twenty-first century.