In a post-apocalyptic France, food is scarce and meat so precious that it is even used as currency. In a dilapidated block of flats, butcher Clapet supplies eccentric tenants with fresh meat of highly dubious origin. When Louison, a former circus clown, applies for a job as a handyman, he realises not that his predecessors have mysteriously vanished. To make matters worse, he falls in love with Julie, the butcher’s short-sighted, cello-playing daughter. She is all too aware of her father’s macabre plans and enlists an underground army of vegetarian rebels to save her beloved from the slaughterhouse.

With Delicatessen (1991), Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro created one of the most idiosyncratic and visually inventive debut films in French cinema. In their grotesque universe, somewhere between a dilapidated 1950s world and a post-apocalyptic nightmare, cannibalism, romance and absurd slapstick blend together wonderfully. The block of flats forms a world entirely of its own, populated by eccentric characters: from a woman who attempts the most ingenious suicide attempts to two old men who build devices that emit the bleating of sheep.

Jeunet and Caro pack their film full of bizarre details, ingenious camera angles and an endless series of visual innovations. The distinctive yellow-brown colours, the grotesque sets and the almost choreographed editing make Delicatessen a feast for the eyes. Unforgettable is the scene in which the rhythmic squeaking of a bed causes the activities of all the residents to proceed in synchrony. Behind all the macabre humour, moreover, lies a disarming love story between two misfits who refuse to bow to the cruel laws of their surroundings.

A wonderfully offbeat cult classic in which the Coen brothers’ black humour, Terry Gilliam’s absurdity and Jacques Tati’s slapstick seem to come together. Delicatessen won four Césars and went on to become an international cult phenomenon.