6 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer
BY ALEX CLARK
Audrey Tautou has been in the public eye since her
breakthrough role in Amélie in 2001. Now, in her first show
as a photographer, she’s playing around with that image
PHOTOGRAPHY
‘I
’m an interesting subject,” says Audrey
Tautou , the French actor who exhibited
her photographs for the fi rst time this
summer at the Arles festival under the
title Superfacial. But it’s not her who
decided that, she points out – i t has been
drummed into her over the 15 years or
so since she became an international star courtesy
of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fi lm Amélie.
Tautou starred as the eccentric young
Parisienne (pictured, right) who, against the
artfully shot background of the streets of
Montmartre, sets her sights on increasing the sum
of human happiness, one kind act at a time. But it
wasn’t simply that the fi lm – charming, whimsical
and fi lled with a particularly French brand of
tragicomedy – was a hit – it was that Tautou’s
heart-shaped, retroussé-nosed and bob-framed
face smiled out from every poster.
Her celebrity – she was only 25 when the fi lm
was released, with a handful of fi lms under her
belt – was instant and overwhelming. “To me,” she
explains, “it was not normal.” The experience that
befell her “was so unexpected and so weird and so
much that suddenly I realised how the imagination
of the public could create you as a new you ”.
Tautou says that she was always interested in
creating work, and in living a life less ordinary,
rather than pursuing fame. After Amélie, the
drawbacks became apparent: “Because your face‘My subject in these photos
is somebody between the
character and who I am’