Amélie: La Valse d'Amélie

There is a clockwork whimsy to Yann Tiersen's waltz from Amélie that disguises just how precisely it breaks your heart. The accordion is the obvious instrument, but listen for the way the piano dances around it — slightly off-kilter, like someone spinning in a kitchen. The tempo is a true waltz: one-two-three, one-two-three, but Tiersen lets phrases breathe unevenly, giving the whole piece the quality of memory rather than performance. It sounds like Paris the way people who've never been to Paris imagine it: cobblestones, café windows fogged with breath, a woman watching strangers from a distance and constructing entire lives for them. The emotional register is bittersweet in the most precise sense — sweet enough to be joyful, bitter enough to ache. It belongs to that rare category of music that feels private even when played publicly. Tiersen wrote this before the film existed, and yet Jeunet's world could not exist without it. It captures something about French New Wave sensibility — life as a series of small, beautiful accidents. You play this on Sunday mornings when you're alone in an apartment and the light is coming in at that particular angle that makes the ordinary look like a film set, and for a few minutes you are the protagonist of something gentle and strange.