1991: Delicatessen

Delicatessen (Jeunet and Caro, 1991) 8/10

Before the worldwide success of his colourful romantic comedic fantasy Amélie, inventive French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was perhaps most well-known for his ill-fated entry in the Alien franchise with 1997's Alien Resurrection. Six years earlier however, Jeunet along with his then directorial co-partner Marc Caro, created a film that would signal the rise of arguably France's most well-known contemporary director.

Set in a yellow-hued post-apocalyptic France, Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen is a bizarre, dark comedy. Situating its action around a decrepit apartment block, the film focuses on the cannibalistic activities emanating from the apartment's connecting bucher shop. Despite the unsanitary conditions, the apartment is a popular locale due to Clapet the building's owner and resident butcher's (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) ability to supply his tenants with juicy cuts of meat. Due to the sparsity of food, lentils and corn seed are viable bartering tools and meat is a virtual unknown. Inventors are forced to create machines to replicate animal sounds in the hope of luring rats and other animals from their lairs. Yet, through his unethical business practices, Clapet routinely manages to utilize the notable resource of meat around: humans.

To counter the paucity of edible susistenence, the butcher places ritually want ads in a local newspaper: requiring a new building superintendant seemingly every fortnight. Clapet's latest gullible victim is Louison (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon): a downhearted ex-clown still mourning the death of his partner Dr. Livingstone. Despite his small stature, Clapet hires him due to the rising discontent amongst his starved lodgers. Yet, when Louison falls in love with Clapet's equally quirky daughter Julie (Marie-Laurie Dougnac), the butcher carves up a plan to cut up his latest occupant.

Inspired by Jeunet's time living over a butcher's shop with his fiancée, Delicatessen is a gloriously original and dark creation. Featuring a typically Jeunetian wide-eyed innocent for a protagonist in Louison, Jeunet outlines the thematic approaches he would later explore in films such as Amélie and A Very Long Engagement. In the film Louison falls in love with the butcher's myopic-sighted daughter. Despite her impaired eyesight, Louison is perhaps the only character who truly loves her for who she is. With humanity and society engaging in caustic destruction, Louison's naive optimism shines throughout the film.

He truly believes there is good in every individual and that evil is something humans are directed towards due to unfortunate circumstances. Yet, in the cynical society in which Louison inhabits, his brand of cheerfulness is resented and viewed with suspicion. While the socially awkward Julie truly sees Louison for his genuinely warm heart, her authoritative father believes he is a threat: undermining the influence has upon in his daughter's life.

Like in his later productions 2001's Amélie and 2004's A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet instills warmth and pathos into his unfortunate eccentric characters without over-sentimentalizing his surreal vision. His protagonists see the world in a myriad of colours. They are eternal optimists: the proponents of fate, destiny, soulmates and so forth. Yet, as Jeunet often notes they are rarities in life. Thus, the other renters represent a view antithetical to Jeunet's protagonists.

These individuals are bitter, manipulative and suicidal. From the cigarette smoking children who steal parcels and panties to the man housing frogs and snails in his flooded apartment, they represent a selfish opponent to the benevolence of Louison and Julie. It is these people who are often the film's most arduous consumers of human flesh. Their parsimonious values hinder their social and ethical development throughout the film. This is notable in the routine visual inspections of a bespectacled woman who repeatedly engages in labryinthine failed suicide attempts due to the voices she hears in her head that her husband rejects as nonsense. Often it is through Louison's indirect handiwork that she is spared from calculated death.

Visually the film is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil in its view of a dystopic world of dehumanized individuals and the counteracting underground rebels who are attempting to break the nation's propensity towards conformity. Given the sub-textual allusions to cannibalism throughout Delicatessen, it is only natural that the film's sewer-based guerilla fighters known as the Troglodins, are a group of inept vegetarians whose bumbling antics are not far removed from a Monty Python film.

Shot using coloured filters, Jeunet's film houses a jaundiced vision that mirrors the social and moral ills of its eccentric oddball characters. Although this method is similar to the approach Lars Von Trier used in his post-apocalyptic debut 1986's The Element of Crime, Jeunet and Caro's utilization of filters is much more agreeable: allowing for the richness of Aline Bonetto's expressionistic set designs to be sumptumously be captured through Darius Khondji's wide-angled lens.

Featuring Jeunet mainstay Dominique Pinon in the lead role as Louison, the actor infuses his rubber-faced character with all the quintessential trappings of an orthodox Jeuentian hero or heroine: brimming with goodness, innocence and optimism in a cynical and vile world. Like Pinon's Louison, the Marie-Laure Dougnac's Julie is similarly brushed with a degree of sadness, but never in a sappy manner.

Rather through Jeunet's eclectic characterizations and the complex visual jokes, the director provides a wonderful blackened edge to the sepia-tinted romantic underpinnings of the story. The film's sex scene in which the corpulent butcher and his frail mistress pressure their springbox is masterfully filled with humorous wonder: as the director simultaneously captures other sexual puns such as two children pumping up their bicycle in unison with other suggestive actions emanating from the apartment.

Upon its initial release Delicatessen was mostly overlooked by its contemporary audiences, but has particularly since the release of Jeunet's Amélie found a subsequent cult following initially spearheaded by Brazil and 12 Monkeys director Terry Gilliam. Evidently ahead of its time, the film is remarkably timeless and fresh in its dystopic setting and romantic storyline. A delightful cult classic, Delicatessen heralded the emergence of one of France's most important visual directors in Jean-Pierre Jeunet: yielding his unique aesthetic sensibilities to an increasingly receptive audience.

* Delicatessen is available on R1 DVD through Miramax Home Video and on R2 through Momentum

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque