Delicatessen

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen opened in 1991 as the directorial duo's debut feature and won two Césars including Best First Feature and Best Original Screenplay. The film became a permanent reference point in 1990s European fantasy cinema and consolidated the Jeunet-Caro visual register (saturated golds and browns, Heath Robinson contraptions, a cast of grotesque-faced character actors) that would carry through The City of Lost Children, Amélie, and the later careers of both directors as separate filmmakers.

In a dystopian post-apocalyptic France where food has become the primary currency, a former circus clown named Louison (Dominique Pinon, Jeunet's most consistent collaborator) takes a job as the handyman in a decaying apartment building. The building is run by the butcher Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), whose meat supply has an irregular but resourceful provenance, and whose daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) (short-sighted, kindly, embarrassed by her father) falls in love with Louison. The film's central tonal register is dark-comic; the third act involves an underground vegetarian Resistance called the Troglodists.

Khondji's photography (Caro and Jeunet's first feature collaboration with him, before City of Lost Children), the production design built around scavenged industrial-era machinery, and the cast of distinctively character-faced French performers (Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado) produced a visual register that has aged into permanent reference. The ceiling-shaking lovemaking sequence (the entire building's domestic activity choreographed to the rhythms of one couple's bed) remains one of the most-cited set pieces in 1990s European comedy.