BECAUSE HE WAS TAPPED BY HOLLYWOOD to direct Alien: Resurrection and then went on to make Amélie, there's a tendency to regard Jean-Pierre Jeunet as the sole creative force behind his breakthrough films Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. In
truth, though, he shared equal billing on both with Marc Caro, an animator and film-maker he'd met in the late 1970s and collaborated with on a number of shorts, ads and music videos. Packaged together – along with their bizarre 30-minute short The Bunker of the Last Gunshots – in Monday's Jeunet & Caro Box Set, it's clear they had a symbiotic relationship, with Jeunet giving shape and purpose to Caro's incredible visuals (he took care of production design); and Caro's more macabre sensibility toning down Jeunet's sometimes excessive penchant for whimsy.
Of their two collaborations, 1991's Delicatessen remains the more satisfying, despite being smaller in scale and, visually speaking, more rough-and-ready. A wilfully oddball love story set in a retro-futurist, post-apocalyptic world, it features Jeunet regular Dominic Pinion as an out-of-work clown who becomes a butcher's assistant, unaware that his predecessors have all been served up for dinner for the hungry residents of a rundown apartment block. The film gets much comedy out of cannibalism, and the sepia-tinged cinematography, surrealist touches, weird camera angles and visual gags that would become a staple of Jeunet's later work are much in evidence. It makes for delicious viewing, even though the world isn't as richly realised as the one he cooked up with Caro for The City of Lost Children.
That film, first released in 1995, was their dream project and though it's an astonishing testament to Jeunet's and Caro's madcap imagination, the narrative isn't quite so involving. A little like an updated Grimms' fairytale, it revolves around a tragic, monstrous scientist called Krank whose inability to dream has driven him to kidnapping children so he can feed off their dreams instead. Hellboy's Ron Perlman gets an early starring role as a circus strongman on a mission to rescue his little brother from Krank's oil rig-style hideout, but with a much bigger budget at its disposal, the film often plays like a Gallic Terry Gilliam film.
Also out on Monday is The Emerald Forest, John Boorman's shaky attempt to weld the lean, mean thrills of his 1972 wilderness classic Deliverance to a more overtly eco-friendly message movie. Made in 1985, when concern about the destruction of the rainforests was really starting to enter public consciousness, this fact-based story revolves around the attempts of an American engineer (Powers Boothe) to track down his seven-year-old son after he goes missing in the Amazon. The bulk of the film takes place ten years later when he finally stumbles upon his now teenage son (played by Boorman's son Charlie, otherwise known as Ewan McGregor's best mate) who has been fully integrated into a tribe of Indians. From this point on, the film becomes a fairly didactic exploration of the conflict between civilisation and nature and, while it has its moments, the action and the symbolism look a little feeble after Apocalypto, The New World and Last of the Mohicans.
