Delicatessen

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro crafted a near-perfect film in Delicatessen, an almost indescribably unique French comedy concerning cannibalism, troglodytes, a circus clown, myopia, suicide, and sex -- and it's all set following some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe. An extraordinary group of actors (with faces worthy of Fellini) play the desperate residents of an apartment where one's next meal could literally be the neighbor from down the hall. The elastic-featured Dominique Pinon, as the clown turned handyman, is a joy to watch. Delicatessen is packed with Rube Goldberg-style set-pieces (I especially love the fixing of the bed spring as well as the rooftop battle during the television broadcast) that leave you breathless.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet has become famous recently for "Amelie" and "A Very Long Engagement". Before he became a cinematic household name in America, he and Marc Caro directed two of the most unusual movies that I've ever seen: "Delicatessen" and "The City of Lost Children" (he also directed "Alien: Resurrection", but that's another story). The former is not all that easy to classify. It has ex-circus clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) moving into an apartment where the butcher is cannibalizing people. While I did like it, I don't want to try to explain it any further, lest I give people the wrong impression of it. Granted, many people will probably want to avoid this movie; there are some pretty unpleasant scenes in it. But anyone who likes to look for artistic, surrealistic, or otherwise avant garde cinema should really admire "Delicatessen". Dominique Pinon, whom Jeunet always casts, is in top-notch form here.

If you think the cannibal movie subgenre has been milked dry... think again! This one will have you from the opening credits. It's set in a crumbling apartment building in 21st century, post-apocalyptic Paris where food is at a minimum, grains are used as money and the butcher downstairs runs a black-market deli providing clientel with what seems to be the only meat product available, and it ain't chicken.

Dominique Pinon is an ex-circus clown who answers a personal ad doing odd jobs there and encounters assorted weirdos while being targeted as the main course. There's a noncomformist who eats snails and frogs, a band of grimy cave-dwelling looters, an unhinged woman whose botched suicide attempts are comic highlights and an amazing musical sequence featuring a cello, creaky bed springs, machinery, drills and other noises combining to create a symphony of sounds.

The oppressive atmosphere and murky brown color schemes could have easily turned this into a dreary disaster, but the directors keep it offbeat, surprising and clever throughout, and don't miss their chance to throw in some inventive black comedy.

`The French,' said James Russell Lowell, `are the most wonderful creatures for talking wisely and acting foolishly that I ever saw.' And good old Henry Adams once said that what he disliked most about the French was their mind, their way of thinking. Why? Because, he said, the French were not serious.

France is not serious. It's an insult; and, it's a compliment. Once their proclivity for playing `Sidewalk Socrates' is understood, one can begin to enjoy them. Henry Adams loved Paris when he got past the surface: `France was not serious, and he [Adams] was not serious in going there.'

I say this by way of introduction to the French movie Delicatessen because, frankly, most French movies really bite. They have that bottom of the birdcage quality, which comes from trying too hard to be deep and philosophical, coming off as ineffably silly instead.

Delicatessen avoids all of that because it doesn't try to be serious. There's nothing pretentious about it. But it could be. It's an outrageously funny black comedy. Only the French, with the penchant for speaking wisely, and acting foolishly, could have pulled this off. It's almost a satirical caricature of French society as a whole.

Set in an apartment complex with a ground floor delicatessen, drifters check in, but don't check out – that is, until a former circus clown shows up. The owner's daughter and the erstwhile circus performer fall in love, throwing her father's brutally perfected supply `system' (fresh meat) all out of whack. The `process,' it seems, cannot tolerate exceptions to the rule, especially not such impractical sentiments as love.

Delicatessen has some outrageously comical setups. And best of all, the inhabitants are all laughable, each in their own way, from the murderous landlord, to his delicate little daughter named Julie. I won't spoil the fun for you by telling you any more. I urge you to find out for yourself.

Jeunet and Caro, with the help of their familiar repertory of actors, create a deeply disturbing and violent world where only a few shreds of conventional social mores remain. These scraps of morality only serve to delineate more clearly the overall decline and collapse of their dystopia. We see a butcher's shop; the proprietor, played by Jean-Claude Dreyfus, is evil almost to the point of caricature. He only manages to survive by killing his lodgers when they get behind with the rent and selling them as meat. However, the situation is given an added twist when we learn that all the lodgers are aware of this; a woman who is sold a joint of mother sheds a couple of stifled tears and mutters she would have liked to have said goodbye. Similarly, the butcher is most apologetic when he accidentally chops off the foot of one of his clients who has paid his rent in full.

Into this hellish world is placed someone with his moral values relatively intact. In this case, it is a circus performer played by the marvellously rubber-faced Dominique Pinon. A less engaging actor might have made this character seem two-dimensional, as he appears to have no faults whatsoever (except a set of over-mobile lips). He enthrals the lodgers' children with his games, is immensely chivalrous to the butcher's daughter and plays the musical saw. Finally, an old edition of his act is broadcast on the flickering black-and-white television, and even the most bloodthirsty lodgers are amazed and delighted. The butcher's jealousy is roused; Good and Innocence is forced to fight Evil and Hatred.

As such, the plot is relatively straightforward. It is the sheer surrealistic imagination that Jeunet and Caro bring to their films that prevent them being unremittingly bleak or simple morality tales. They display a brilliant sense of musical timing- the whole building frequently becomes an orchestra of creaking bed-springs, croaking frogs, and crackling radios; above all this soars a love-duet of a cello and a musical saw. The faded `look' of the film complements this. With the exception of a single television remote control, nothing here would be out of place in in a exhibition of 40s and 50s design. In `The City of Lost Children' the exuberance of the design threatens to swamp the slender storyline on occasions; here, the more `grown-up' themes and less fantastic design go hand in hand.

(A word of warning about the video release- the subtitles appear to have been written be a couple of Frenchmen who really ought to have concentrated harder in their English classes at school. Apart from that, I wholeheartedly recommend this joyously grotesque film.)