Four years ago, the film Amelie was a huge hit for French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. This week, Marc Fennell takes a look at the films that lead up to Amelie's success.
Most of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films were co-directed with Marc Caro, who handled the design, while Jeunet directed the actors. Their short films won a string of awards, so in 1991 they took the plunge into feature film with Delicatessen.
After an unseen war, meat has become scarce. The inhabitants of a small village have turned to eating the visitors. When an unsuspecting clown comes to stay, the locals get hungry.
Jeunet and Caro create a fantasy world of diabolically imaginative visual gags. Everything from the use of colour to the shape of people's heads - is exaggerated or distorted. The cartoon-like approach makes an appalling premise, seem almost tasty. Delicatessen's success allowed Jeunet & Caro to realise an idea they'd been sitting on for ten years: The City Of Lost Children.
