Delicatessen, a zany little film directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet that’s startling and clever, blew me away with its sheer originality and liveliness. This 1991 film encourages the viewer to connect with the characters on a complex level, developing both disdain and fondness for the decisions that each of them makes. The film begins in a rural apartment building in a post-apocalyptic France. A shortage of food forcing grain to be used as currency has forced out the older social structure as the struggle to regain balance and unity between the characters takes priority.
It sounds dark and dramatic, but directors Jeunet and Caro demonstrate an impressively confident feel of comic timing. Thriving on quirks, the film’s most distinctive aspect is its careful use of musical sequences, accented by uncomfortable uneasiness and using quick cuts reveal rhythms and even melodies played out in a light-hearted natured. For example, they set up goony little nonsense symphonies, such as everybody in the building simultaneously bowing cellos, Dominique Pinon painting the roof while springing off his tied braces, two brothers testing their animal noise toys, all in choreographed symphony to Jean-Claude Dreyfus and Karin Viard’s love-making. Or like Dominique Pinon and Karin Viard’s little dance while bouncing on a bed to test loose springs, the two of them keeping time to a song playing on the TV.
Jeunet and Caro’s keen sense of black humor is ever-present, particularly in Sylvie Laguna’s bizarre attempts to commit suicide with Rube Goldberg-type setups such as connecting her doorbell to a sewing machine that sews through a piece of cloth that will pull a lamp into the bath (which fails when the power goes off). Particularly, her climactic attempt to use a combination of pills, gas, shotgun, Molotov cocktail and hanging, which all farcically fail at once, portrays this serious subject in a lighter less emotionally draining way for the viewer. At the foundations of the film is the romance between monkey-faced Dominique Pinon and innocently lovely Marie-Louise Dougnac, which plays with a genuine sweetness in the middle of the film’s off-kilter tone.
The characters of Louison (Dominique Pinon) and Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) caught my attention in particular because of their idiosyncrasies and the relationships they take on with other characters they run into. Louison (Dominique Pinon) answers an ad to work as a handyman doing odd jobs for a butcher. Unbeknownst to Louison, the butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has hatched a plot to turn the unsuspecting worker into the next choice cut for the tenants in his dilapidated building. The real story comes when Louison, who is not without skills and charm, becomes a gear in the clockwork of the butcher’s gruesome scheming. He soon falls in love with Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) as the story deepens as she is the painfully shy daughter of the Butcher.
Incredibly inventive, both in storytelling and set and character designs, Delicatessen uses its quirky tone to combine a surprisingly visual film with the bleakest of social satires. Literally one of the many movies that must be watched to truly understand its genius, Delicatessen marks another collaboration of genius directing team Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and is one of the sharpest of all futuristic foreign films.
Billy Lutz
Film Club Co-President
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