Delicatessen<br /><br />Brilliantly inspired lunatic genius. This movie is set in another universe that looks like maybe a post-apocalyptic French village. It's along the same lines as Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," a world in which too much has gone wrong and there's an underground group trying to right things. It's another "best movie you've never heard of" candidate, directed by Marc Caro and Jean- Pierre Jeunet; starring a bunch of French actors you've never heard of. (Well, I've never heard of them.)<br /><br />I'm unwilling to try to summarize the plot, I won't even try to describe it. It's a bizarre, funny movie that you'll love or hate. The characters are wonderful, the situations are delicious, and the possibilities are intriguing. As I sit here remembering the movie, the scenes wash through my mind, and there is nothing I can recount here that would make any sense.<br /><br />Caro has done nothing else I've heard of. Jeunet wrote and directed (in the American English titles) "A Very Long Engagement," "Amelie," and "The City of Lost Children," all of which I've seen, and "Alien 4" (also known as "Alien: Resurrection"), which I've seen parts of as I've surfed the channels. "Delicatessen" is nothing like them, nothing like anything else you've seen.<br /><br />Ultimately it's a series of more or less loosely connected skits that are fall off your chair hilarious, tied together in building with a street-level deli and people renting rooms on the five or so floors above. The originality of the scenes is unequalled.