Dominique Pinon

In Delicatessen (1991), Dominique Pinon makes a former clown's physical ingenuity look like an everyday necessity. His Louison seems to need these skills, rather than having them merely for our entertainment. It is a sweet performance without being an appeal to be found adorable, and it gives Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's black comedy someone worth caring about. The surrounding eccentrics sometimes tire us; Louison does not.

That leading role was his breakthrough, a decade after his feature debut in Diva (1981). It also began the sustained screen partnership with Jeunet that took him into the multiple parts of the Diver and the Clones in The City of Lost Children (1995), then to Vriess in Alien: Resurrection (1997). Those parts belong to a career in which he has frequently been cast as eccentric or grotesque characters. The danger is easy to see: an actor so readily cast as peculiar can be asked to supply peculiarity and little else.

The useful lesson from Delicatessen is how much the casting around him matters. Marie-Laure Dougnac's Julie allows the romance to be tender, while Jean-Claude Dreyfus's Clapet provides a blunt enough threat to keep the comedy from becoming harmless. We were moved by Louison and Julie because their affection feels worth protecting amid all that cruelty. Pinon does not have to make every oddity lovable, which is fortunate when some of the supporting characters are so insistently strange. His warmth is enough to keep the cannibalism funny without making it pleasant.

Jeunet continued to cast him, as Joseph in Amélie (2001) and Sylvain in the period drama A Very Long Engagement (2004). We would not ask Pinon to give up strange characters; they offer plenty of work for an actor with his physical expressiveness. We would ask directors to remember how much it matters that Louison is allowed to be sympathetic. Start with Delicatessen, provided everyone on the sofa is willing to find cannibalism funny.