The first trailer for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Changer l’eau des fleurs feels instantly familiar. Perhaps that is precisely the point.

There are filmmakers whose work you recognize before you see their name. A certain composition. A face photographed with just a little more curiosity than realism demands. An object suddenly carrying emotional significance. A street, a room, a letter, a glance all seemingly ordinary things, reorganized until they feel strangely precious. Jean-Pierre Jeunet has always been one of those filmmakers.

The first images from Changer l’eau des fleurs, his adaptation of Valérie Perrin’s bestselling novel, immediately return us to that particular emotional geography. Leïla Bekhti stars as Violette, a cemetery keeper in a small Burgundy town whose quiet routine consists partly of listening to the stories and confidences of those who pass through. When police officer Julien Seul arrives to place his mother’s ashes on the grave of the man she loved, his curiosity about Violette and the mysterious disappearance of her husband begins to uncover a past she has spent years living beside rather than confronting. The film, co-written by Jeunet and longtime collaborator Guillaume Laurant, arrives in French cinemas December 9.

And then there is the trailer.

Within seconds, there are unmistakable traces of Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. Even Jacques Brel’s “Quand on n’a que l’amour,” used for the teaser, seems to announce that we are entering a France filtered through memory, romance and melancholy rather than documentary realism.

At first, perhaps, it feels a little too much like Amélie. But that may also be the least interesting way to look at it.

Because a filmmaker returning to the vocabulary that made his work recognizable is not necessarily repeating himself. In auteur cinema, repetition can become grammar. Jeunet has spent decades constructing his own visual syntax: saturated emotion, heightened faces, coincidences that feel predestined, melancholy interrupted by humor, lonely people connected by seemingly insignificant things. To ask him to abandon all of that would almost be to ask him not to make a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film.

The important question is whether Changer l’eau des fleurs uses that familiar language to say something new.

There is certainly enough darkness underneath Perrin’s story to suggest it can. Violette lives among the dead but spends her days comforting the living. Love survives people. Grief changes shape. Memory can imprison us, but it can also become the mechanism through which we finally understand what happened to us. Jeunet’s softness, applied to those ideas, could become something considerably more mature than simple nostalgia.

Interestingly, Jeunet himself has indicated that the film would not simply reproduce the fantasy of Amélie, describing a more restrained approach for this story. That tension between the recognizable Jeunet touch and a potentially quieter, more emotionally grounded film may ultimately be what makes Changer l’eau des fleurs so intriguing.

And perhaps this is also a good moment to reconsider the word “unrealistic.”

It is a criticism frequently attached to romantic visions of France. Amélie has heard it for 25 years. More recently, Emily in Paris has generated endless variations of the same complaint: Paris does not look like that. People do not live like that. France is not like that.

As a French person, I have never completely agreed with the premise.

When I lived in Paris, I was perfectly aware that another Paris existed around me, the métro delays, the gray mornings, the administrative frustrations … But I also made choices about the Paris I wanted to experience. Where I walked. Where I had coffee. Which streets I took home. Which people I surrounded myself with. Which details I noticed.

That version was real too.

Perhaps what Jeunet understands better than most is that reality is not simply what surrounds us. It is also what we train ourselves to notice.

Two people can walk down exactly the same street and inhabit psychologically different cities. One sees traffic, another sees the light hitting a balcony. One notices a broken pavement; another notices an elderly couple holding hands outside a boulangerie. Neither is lying. Perception is selective by nature.

Cinema simply makes that selection visible.

That is why Jeunet’s France has always produced such powerful nostalgia even, sometimes, for a France that never existed exactly as he photographed it. He is not necessarily showing us the country as an anthropological fact. He is showing us what happens when ordinary life is observed by someone determined to find tenderness, absurdity and romance inside it.

And that is substantially more interesting than realism.

The casting reinforces that promise. Bekhti is joined by Matthias Schoenaerts, Melvil Poupaud, Anouk Grinberg, Sergio Castellitto, Alban Lenoir and Élodie Batard Gaultier. Jeunet even revealed at Angoulême that he initially considered reuniting with Audrey Tautou for Violette before ultimately recognizing something in Bekhti that made her right for the role.

Maybe that is the clearest indication of where Changer l’eau des fleurs needs to go.

The trailer can remind us of Amélie. The colors can remind us. The peculiar people, the romantic objects, the letters and little mysteries can remind us. But Violette needs to become Violette. If she does, then the familiar signs will not feel like imitation. They will feel like the handwriting of their director.

Twenty-five years after Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet still appears interested in the possibility that life becomes different when we look at it differently. In 2026, that idea may feel less naïve than necessary.

Changer l’eau des fleurs opens in France on December 9, 2026.