It is a dreadful oversight on someone’s part that the picture of Audrey Tatou as “Amélie” doesn’t adorn the Wikipedia page for the word “coquette.”

Wide-eyed and adorable, with a pixie haircut emphasizing her youth and that dimpled smile evoking a sunny, sweet and sexy innocence, she embodied her career-defining role in a quirky Parisian romance that merits re-release this Valentine’s Day.

Because it’s not like the cinema — Hollywood or elsewhere — is cranking out anything as light and sweet and romantic as this to compete with its memory.

Nominated for five Oscars, this 2001 classic was a peak moment for the whimsy of French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose wildly-eccentric “Delicatessen” announced him to the world (co-directing with Marc Caro) and who was fresh off the dark wonders of “Alien: Resurrection” when he and co-writer Guillaume Laurent concocted this confection.

“Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain” as it is titled in French, is a Parisian romance set just after the death of Princess Diana, a quirky story of a waitress who has given up on love who decides to start interfering in the “messy lives” of others — mostly the lovelorn.

“A woman without love wilts like a flower without the sun,” a newstand owner tells one of Amélie’s friends and colleagues.

So Amélie will match-make, prank avenge a cruel grocer and set out to solve the riddle of a dropped album of discarded photo booth snapshots from a squirrelly eccentric (Mathieu Kassovitz) who just might be her own soul mate.

This is the Paris of romance — of accordions, gamboling locals and gawking tourists and late summer (Princess Diana died at the end of August, 1997) — covered in flowers and sun, bathed in bittersweet sadness at the car crash deaths of Diana, her beau and driver.

Amélie will note that downtrodden grocer’s assistant (Jamel Debbouze), the frustrated, rejected writer, co-workers and others (including Jeanet’s “Delicatessen” good luck charm, Dominique Pinon, as a rejected “stalker”) and bring a little sweetness and light into their lives.

A kidnapped garden gnome, traveling the world, snatches of The Tour de France, old vaudeville acts and the guitar stylings of Sister Rosetta Tharpe decorate this movie of blackout bits, elaborate gags, reveries, coincidences and lists — of everything this character doesn’t like and everything Amélie loves.

“Skipping stones at the Canal St. Martin,” “looking back at the faces of the people in the dark” cinema, and assessing how many orgasms are occurring in Paris, the City of Love, at any given moment, occupy Amélie’s thoughts.

“Quinze!” she announces about that last question, in dainty French with English subtitles.One tends to forget, with all the cute and quirky bits, how bawdy this film and most Jeunet films are.

He keeps his camera tight on Tatou, often filming her from above, looking up, the perfect picture of the beguiling coquette as she stalks the tunnel of terrors ride employee, one among many side hustles of photo-album “collector” Nino Quincampoix (Kassovitz).

And as we drift dreamily through assorted arrondissements in and around Montmartre, we fall under the city’s spell and into the movie’s playful playground of the mind.

Nino wonders who his photo-album stalker is, and then four (talking) frames of a photobooth-shot laborer give him clues. Is she pretty?

“Yes.” “Not bad.” “Beautiful.” “Pretty!” the four versions of the same face bicker.

She is the girl of his “dreams,” he is warned. And as Jeunet puts Tautou through her paces, pranking, luring and exulting in a summery ride on a motoscotter through the world’s most beautiful city, she becomes ours.

There was plenty of pushback to “Amélie Poulain” when she came into this humdrum world in 2001. Too cute, too “twee” and just too damned sweet — “cloying” — for many tastes.

Jeunet and Tatou would reteam for the romantically melancholy post-WWI romance “A Very Long Engagement,” with Tautou dazzling in “Dirty Pretty Things” and co-starring in one of the blockbusters of the 2000s — “The Da Vinci Code.” Looking back now, “Amélie” might rightly be regarded as the peak moment for them both.

But if you, like me, like Amélie, relish “cracking a Crème Brûlée with a spoon,” this could be just the romantic tonic for this fraught election year Valentine’s Day, a feather-light meringue of a romance to remind us there will always be a Paris and maybe it’s high time we went back.

Rating: R, sex, nudity

Cast: Audrey Tatou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Claire Maurier, Clotilde Mollet, Isabelle Nanty,
Urbain Cancelier and Dominique Pinon.

Credits: Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, scripted by Guillaume Laurent and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:02