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Apparently, Amélie caused something of a stir in France - the home of cinematic "neorealism". Film academics are still positing it as the "enemy film", as I've discovered very recently. It's fair enough to say that Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film bears little resemblance to the master works of New Wave and neorealist cinema - starting perhaps with François Truffaut's Les quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and moving on into the 1960s and way beyond via films such as Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle (Breathless).

The quest apparently seems to be to ensure that cinema portrays the "real" in some tangible way. Amélie fails at several levels: the picture-postcard views of Paris; the inaccurate ethnic mix; the tight control exercised over every shot in every sequence; and no doubt those moments when Audrey Tautou glances beguilingly at us, the audience - straight through the proscenium arch of the celluloid.

However, Jean-Paul Belmondo does the very same at one point in Breathless, and since Amélie's melting into a puddle of water in the café seems to pass without much comment - and since while Hiroshima Mon Amour may have been grittingly realistic in visual terms, Alain Resnais' other big film, A'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at/in Marienbad) is hardly realistic at any level - one wonders where the criticism should stop.

Amélie is a fantasy. It doesn't take us very long to pick that up, and surely we can accept it as such without searching for "neorealism". Of course Paris doesn't really look that cute, but we can accommodate that. Similarly, while the film portrays a few Algerian characters, the absence of - say - black or Vietnamese people doesn't automatically have to jar with our senses. If it did, then any period drama set in a largely white Anglo-Saxon Christian England would be on the wrong side of the tracks from the first frame.

Jeunet's film may be full of artefacts and full of control, but surely that's just superficial. It doesn't quite matter how Amélie's mother meets her end, just as it doesn't quite matter how Amélie eventually teases her reclusive father out of the family home. Nor does it matter that Amélie herself is apparently capable of dissolving. These things go beyond visual tricks and get themselves deeply embedded, but there are even deeper levels. And if we're searching for realism, and we think we've found it when Nino calmly observes a topless dancer through an opening, then that's inconsequential too.

What's really happening is best expressed by starting with the full French title: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. Quite simply, Amélie's destiny is to escape from her self-constructed world of curious observations, quirky behaviour, practical jokes, crazy attempts to "liberate" others and so on. And all she has to do to achieve that is to fall in love.

This very real destiny should ground us as observers and should ground the film. It's what we all crave, isn't it. From the first moment when we distinguish "self" from "other", and start carefully constructing our "self-image", while we're working intensively on the self, we know that there'll be no true resolution of the situation until we find the "other" whom we seek.

Without this magical quest, our lives would be so ordinary. But we're not content with ordinariness. We dress in particular ways, adopt accents, vocabulary, mannerisms and so on - all artefacts. We align ourselves with one subcultural group or another - or, for that matter, with the mainstream - excluding all subcultures. In that respect, the metalheads in the moshpit are no different from the suave opera-goers in their tuxedos - each individual simply wants fulfilment.

The realism within Amélie is buried beneath the surface to be sure. It's a realism of intentions and emotions, rather than something visual. It's user-friendly and reassuring, but that's also harmless. The real "trick" is to achieve the objective, through the miraculous and seemingly unreal process of actually connecting "self" with "other" in some kind of real bond.

At the end of the film, Amélie rips off into the streets on Nino's motorbike - free at last from both the quirky world of her own imagination and, perhaps, from our set of constraints. Through her passion, surely Amélie has discovered the reality that the critics long for with so much passion of their own.

I wish I could edit at least one mistake now: obviously, "L'année".