It's a comedy, no it's a documentary, maybe it's a fairy tale, or an exploration of the way one life can touch so many others. Actually, it's "Amelie," the latest film by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet -- the man behind 1991's "Delicatessen" and 1995's "The City of Lost Children" -- and it's one of the best films of the year.

The film's light-hearted spirit but deeper humanity makes it just the sort of picture Americans might crave these days and don't be surprised if "Amelie" walks away with a much-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

The charming, child-like and porcelain-doll cute Audrey Tautou stars as Amelie Poulain, a fun-loving, sensual, adventurous and excessively lonely little girl growing up on the outskirts of Paris. She craves her father's embrace, which never comes, she loses her mother in a freak accident and she has no friends.

Jeunet and his co-writer Guillaume Laurant render Amelie's early life in a quirky, often-absurd, fast-paced documentary style that begins with microscopic pictures of her conception.

When she is old enough, Amelie flees her sheltered suburban life for Paris, where she has an apartment in Montmartre and a waitressing job at the nearby Two Windmills cafe. But her loneliness trails her to the city of light. Like herself, her neighbors live alone with sad pasts and/or disappointing presents.

Her landlord keeps the letters from the husband that deserted her in the cupboard, tied with a ribbon. A neighbor who is too frail to leave the house paints another copy of a famous Renoir painting each year. The apparently dull-witted shop assistant at the produce market is the butt of his supervisor's cruel jokes and insults.

But slowly Amelie begins to realize that life doesn't just happen to her; she can affect the lives of others and sets out on a string of projects that help her father escape his weighty inertia, affect the relationship between the shop assistant and his boss and change the lives of the landlord and the frail man one flight below.

During this portion of the film, Amelie finds a bag lost by a young man she frequently sees in Metro and train stations scouring beneath photo booths. In the bag is the man's carefully assembled photo album of strangers' pictures rescued from the trash, where they were deposited by disappointed photo booth patrons. She becomes fascinated with the man, Nino Quincampoix (Mathiew Kassovitz) and the third section of the movie is the pair's cat and mouse game. Will they meet? Will they like each other when they do? Can Amelie make the leap to altering her own destiny?

Smart, funny, charming, engaging, sad ... "Amelie" is all of these things and if at two hours it seems slightly overlong, it's hard to pick a scene that you'd want to have been deprived of seeing.

From the oddball cast of characters to the skewed, almost surreal vision of modern Paris, to the heartwarming (without being schmaltzy) story, "Amelie" is a must-see.

"Amelie" opens at Landmark's Downer Theatre, Fri., Nov. 9. Click here for showtimes.