DELICATESSAN
A film review by George V. Reilly
Copyright 1992 George V. Reilly
DELICATESSEN is a film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro and written by Jeunet, Caro, and Gilles Adrien. It stars Dominic Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, and Jean-Claude Dreyfus. French with subtitles.
DELICATESSEN calls to mind all sorts of adjectives: surreal, bizarre, grotesque, hilarious. It has been likened to Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL. To me it's more like Gormenghast---a huge, rambling house, set in mysterious isolation, peopled with the oddest characters.
In the post-apocalyptic world of DELICATESSEN, food is at a premium: fresh meat is impossible to get. Clapet (Dreyfus) the butcher has hit upon the answer. He lures unsuspecting young men to the house which he runs, fattens them up a little, then kills them, and sells the meat to his tenants.
Such an innocent is Louison (Pinon), a clown who lost his job when his partner, Mr. Livingstone the chimp, was killed and eaten when he strayed. Louison is taken on as a repair man in exchange for free food and board. Soon he meets and enchants Julie (Dougnac), Clapet's timid short-sighted daughter.
Julie falls in love with Louison and decides to save him. She gets in touch with the Troglodytes, who are literally the Underground Resistance. They are unwilling to help her, fearing a trap, but she convinces them with the intelligence that her father's cellar is filled with food.
The Troglodytes, who are howlingly inept, mount their combined attack and rescue on the next night, the same night that the butcher has decided to kill the unwitting Louison. The events of this night take up the latter half of the film.
The characters are delightful. Louison, the circus clown, with his funny-ugly face is gravely hilarious. Julie, is shy and innocent but determined to save her love. Clapet is both malevolent and insinuating. Much of the first half of the film is devoted to a series of vignettes about the minor characters. Aurore Inteligator who hears voices and attempts suicide with a succession of ever more elaborate Rube Goldberg--like devices. The two men making a collection of toys that moo when they are turned over. The old man in the half-flooded basement surrounded by snails and frogs which he eats. The two boys who steal and sabotage their neighbours' property in ingenious manner. The Troglodytes, like taller Time Bandits. The Postman, Clapet's crony and Julie's would-be lover, who acts like Dirty Harry and who always get the mail through.
Perhaps the funniest scene is when the butcher is making love to his mistress. We never see them directly, just the underside of the bouncing bed and the squeaking springs. The sound of the springs is conducted all over the house by the pipes and the airvents to Julie playing her cello, to a woman beating a carpet, to Louison painting the ceiling with a roller while attached to the wall with his braces bouncing back and forth, and to a metronome. As the butcher increases his speed, the springs squeak faster and faster, louder and louder, pulsing through the house, and we cut more and more quickly from the springs to the cello to the carpet beating to the rebounding painter to the metronome and back to the springs, until finally we have reached a throbbing intensity which is released---at last---when the butcher climaxes. The audience laughed themselves silly as this happened.
Visually, DELICATESSEN is interesting too. The house is dark and gloomy, suggestive of what goes on there. Only Julie's room is bright, an oasis amidst the evil. The characters are dressed in 1940s styles and would not have looked out of place in France under the Nazis.
I greatly enjoyed DELICATESSEN and I recommend it. ________________ George V. Reilly GeorgR@microsoft.com (formerly gvr@cs.brown.edu)
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