When Amélie came out in 2001, did you love it? Of course you did, unless you have a cold piece of flint for a heart.

For most viewers, it was our first peek at Audrey Tautou, a woman so beautiful that she made us all want to be melancholy and wear cardigans. Alas, what you may not have realised is that the movie told us one of the greatest lies of our era: that any mere mortal could look good with Amélie's hairstyle.

Below, 10 laments about the humble French bob that we'll never forget.

1. Just look at that fringe.

When I was eight, my mother accidentally cut me a short fringe and I spent the next month looking like a tiny simpleton. And yet on Amélie this fringe is a breath of fresh air. 'Welcome to my forehead,' it seems to murmur, invitingly. 'Have you noticed how lovely my eyebrows are?'

2. Sure, it looks stunning on Audrey Tautou. 

But if you took a photo of her into your hair salon, you probably came out looking like this.

Sorry to remind you. 

3. So, you literally just pin it back with a few kirby grips and it looks amazing, yeah?

Yet try walking into your office like this, and you'll be lucky to reach your desk without someone saying 'Is your shower broken?'

She's carrying it off with panache, but this is the 'my hair is greasy' makeshift hairstyle de nos jours. 

4. Not for Amélie, the temptations of messing about with a winning formula.

She found the right hair-do early on in life, and stuck with it. She didn't give in to those phases that the rest of us had in our teens, where we used Sun-In, or bought crimping irons, or obsessively wore a zigzag parting every day for six months.

5. This is from a lesser remembered scene in which Amélie opens a box with a shiny, reflective lid, looks at her hair and exclaims 'Ooh la la! J'ai forgotten how magnifique my hair looks today.' That's roughly the dialogue, anyway – my French is sketchy.

On her, even the hint of sideburn is delightful.

6. Look at those choppy, unlevel ends. I'm not being bitchy when I say that she definitely cut this herself. 

It gives a quirky, elfin effect that makes you want to run away with her – perhaps to make love in a bluebell wood, or open an overwhelmingly charming patisserie.

On you, it would look like you were having a nervous breakdown. Your boss would literally request your emergency contact numbers from HR, and telephone your mother.

7. This is not an ironic, trendy headscarf, à la Paloma Faith. This is a 25-year-old woman genuinely wearing a floral scarf as a disguise while she stalks the man she has a crush on – and making it look painfully fabulous.

Any normal young woman who attempted this would look like she was playing a cockney washerwoman in a terrible, terrible musical.

8. What is this divine and inexplicable situation at the back of her head?

It's a labyrinth of shiny twists and turns, and if we knew how to recreate it, we'd be wearing it to the opera, not for tea and biscuits with a hermit neighbour.

Sorry to bring physics into this but there's simply no way anyone could turn a choppy bob into this kind of elaborate up-do. She's cheating the laws of nature. This is the hairstyle equivalent of when Mary Poppins pulled a full-length floor lamp out of her handbag.

9. It's devilishly seductive.

With it pinned up like that, she looks like Mathieu Kassovitz has interrupted her doing a spring clean. Yet she also looks winningly romantic. Forget everything you once memorised from teen magazines, because when it comes to seducing men: tumbling Rapunzel hair is out, and tidy up-dos are in.

10. It turns out that Amélie also has the perfect hairstyle for speeding through Paris streets on the back of her lover's scooter.

Goodbye to the indignity of your hair wrapping around your face, sticking to your lipgloss and leaving you looking like your head has been tumble-dried. Amélie's bob, softly bouncing in the breeze, speaks of eternal romance, lightness of the soul – and the feeling of being so French, nonchalant and cool that you don't even need a helmet.

This magnificent hair... It was the stuff of our early-millennial dreams. It is poetic. It is irresistible. It is absolutely not for the likes of you and me.