Delicatessen
Jeunet (and Marc Caro) plant the seeds of The City of Lost Children. C’est magnifique…
In a single building in a smoggy world, on the outskirts of a unseen city, a bunch of quirky characters live on the upper floors of a butcher shop, the titular Deli(catessen). It’s almost a given that the meat sold there has human characteristics, since there’s barely enough food going around for people.
Our protagonist arrives applying for a job elsewhere, but ends up being hired by the butcher for oddjobs around the building. He meets his daughter Julie by accident, rescuing her package from an ambush on the mailmen, which goes postal with his service revolver.
Julie and the protagonist have a weird date, but she lives in mortal fear he will be turned by her father into steaks, so she seeks the clandestine help of the Troglodistes, an underground organisation of weirdos. They are to snatch the protagonist away to safety in exchange for loads of corn the butcher has stockpiled.
After a massively complex series of events, involving everyone on the building, the butcher is butchered by his own hand, while everyone else like ambiguously ever after.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.