If Delicatessen was a claustrophobic vaudeville set in a single sepia-toned apartment building, The City of Lost Children (La Cité des enfants perdus) is its older sibling: a gargantuan opera, a grotesque symphony drenched in salt water, rust, and the green smoke of oblivion. It is the moment when the Jeunet & Caro diarchy, at the height of its creative symbiosis, obtains a budget worthy of its imagination and uses it not to create beauty, but to construct a baroque nightmare. This is not a film, it is an ecosystem. It is a toxic, tactile world that sticks to the retina, a world-building endeavor so all-encompassing that it makes the plot (a kidnapping, a search) seem like a mere pretext for unprecedented visual fetishism.

The film's aesthetic is a declaration of war on anti-realism. Jeunet and Caro blend the poetics of Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows with Cronenberg's mutant physicality, all filtered through Terry Gilliam's obsession with pipes and gears. But the result is unique. It's dieselpunk, not steampunk. It is a world powered not by clean steam, but by dirty fuel, by electricity that sizzles and stinks. The entire city—an oil rig turned into Purgatory, besieged by an absinthe-colored fog—is the real protagonist. It is a labyrinth of corroded metal, rotten wood, and opaque glass, where every object seems organic and every human being seems mechanical. In this, the collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier is no mere affectation: the costumes do not dress the characters, they define them. They are exoskeletons that reveal their function: the rough sweaters of the sailors, the quasi-fascist uniforms of the Cyclops, Miette's Victorian doll dress.

The philosophical engine of the work is one of the most cruel and poetic ideas of 1990s cinema: the tragedy of Krank (a Daniel Emilfork who looks like a painting by Egon Schiele that has come to life). Krank is a failed experiment, a prematurely aged clone, a superior intellect in a decrepit body. His tragedy is not evil, but sterility. He is the ultimate adult: he has knowledge, he has power, but he has lost the ability to dream. And in a universe that equates dreams with innocence, Krank is hell. His platform is a hellish laboratory where, like a reverse Prometheus, he tries to steal the fire of imagination from children, obtaining only their nightmares in return. The film thus becomes a chilling metaphor for the creative act: the sterile artist (Krank) who tries to vampirize purity (children) to feed his machine, failing miserably. It is the nightmare of an impotent demiurge.

Two forms of purity oppose this senile artificial intelligence. The first is One (Ron Perlman, perfect in his role as a “brute with a heart of gold,” a Barnum circus archetype). One is pure physicality, a Golem of muscles and childlike loyalty, driven only by love for his kidnapped little brother. He doesn't understand Krank's world, he can only punch him. He is the body. But the real protagonist is Miette (Judith Vittet), the brain of the resistance. She is the antithesis of Krank: she is not a child, she is a miniature adult, a cynical street veteran who leads an army of petty thieves. Yet, despite her cynicism, she retains her ability to dream, the innocence that Krank craves. The alliance between One and Miette is that between brute force and cunning intelligence, united against the perversion of technology and old age.

Around them, Jeunet and Caro unleash their Wunderkammer (chamber of wonders) of grotesque characters, a veritable freak show that would make Tod Browning pale. There are The Siamese Twins (La Pieuvre), who rule the orphanage with a mixture of greed and mutual dependence. There are the Clones (Dominique Pinon, multiplied), identical, idiotic beings who serve their creator. There is the brain-in-a-jar, Irvin, who acts as a disembodied patriarch. But the most ingenious and prophetic creation is The Cyclops. They are a transhumanist cult ante litteram. They are men who have voluntarily given up their organic sight (and therefore their ability to dream, to feel) in exchange for a technological vision, prostheses that allow them only to record reality. In 1995, at the dawn of the digital age, Jeunet and Caro staged a fierce critique of mediated vision, of our obsession with looking at the world through a screen (an artificial eye), losing the ability to interpret it emotionally.

Technically, the film is a crucial artifact, the bridge between analog and digital. The obsession with the “poetics of rust” is total, yet The City of Lost Children was a pioneer in the use of digital compositing (revolutionary at the time, managed by the French Pitof) to create fog, multiply clones, or animate the trained flea. But unlike much of the CGI of the 1990s, here the digital serves to enhance the analog world, to make it even denser and more suffocating, not to replace it. The film feels analog, it smells of oil and seaweed. It is a work that overwhelms the senses, perhaps even too rich, too dense, a film that risks suffocating the viewer under the weight of its own wonderful inventiveness. It is the pinnacle of the collaboration between the two directors, before Jeunet distilled (and perhaps sterilized) this aesthetic for mass consumption with Amélie. This is the pure, toxic, and therefore essential version.