DELICATESSEN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Weird and morbid comedy about life in some strange post-Holocaust future. Cannibals and vegetarians battle in a world where the only meat available is from other people. Meanwhile, life goes on in a strange apartment house over a delicatessen. Offbeat is putting it mildly. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4).
The time is the future, perhaps ten years after it all went bad. The sky is thick yellow fog. Humans have two legs and frogs have four, but the only other animals left alive have six or eight. Legal tender is bags of lentils or corn. And something else has disappeared with the world we knew. What is missing is something like sanity. With so few animals around, society has been broken into two classes, vegetarians and those who have taken to heart the adage that one man's meat is another man's person, so to speak. The setting is an apartment house standing over one of the few remaining delicatessens. And only rarely does the delicatessen have meat. In the apartment there are the long-term residents and the transients. The transients do not so much move out as disappear. And as their luck would have it, they always disappear just in time to miss one of the meat days at the delicatessen.
In the apartment building live a typical bunch of people. There is the supremely myopic cello player who has nearly given up on finding a husband. There are two men who make those toy cylinders that when turned upside down moo like a cow used to. Then there is the nice woman who hears voices telling her to commit suicide. She tries to oblige in complex and creative ways. Fortunately or not, her Rube-Goldberg-like suicide mechanisms just don't work. Into this old neighborhood moves an ex-circus clown ear-marked to be literally dead meat. Somehow he evades the butcher's knife and falls for the nearly blind cello player.
With many a supremely gruesome twist and turn, this film is a logical descendent of the British film THE BED-SITTING ROOM and the French LE DERNIER COMBAT--two very strange slice-of-post-holocaust-life black comedies. And it perhaps is the most entertaining of the three. Some of its visual style is also reminiscent of BRAZIL. the style is mostly short gag scenes that eventually add up to a plot which in the final third is somewhere between madcap and frenetic. This is a film for particularly morbid tastes in comedy. I give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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