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Delicatessen 1991
Directed by: Marc Caro,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by: Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude
Dreyfus
Language: French [with English subtitles]
Look for it at the video store under:
foreign [France]
Watch it when you’re in the mood
for
something: artsy-fartsy,
darkly
comic,
fantastical,
whimsical
The critic says:
½/
5 the rating system
explained
Fun factor: ½/5 |
Plot synopsis
In post-apocalyptic France,
survivors buy goods and services with dried grains, and scramble for
sustenance in whatever way they can. When circus clown Mr. Louison loses
his longtime partner and beloved friend, the talented monkey Dr.
Livingston, to hungry carnivorous thieves, he quits his act and answers
the first ad for work he sees: a listing in Hard Times newspaper
offering room and board in exchange for light apartment building
maintenance. Little does Louison suspect what he’s really being hired
for when building manager Clapet – who also doubles as the butcher in
the delicatessen downstairs – gives him the job and apartment. Clapet,
as it turns out, has a little deal going on with the other apartment
dwellers: he lures strangers into the building with the promise of work
and accommodation, then butchers them, dividing up the meat amongst his
fellow neighbors in exchange for valuable grains. But when Louison
proves altogether more useful than his predecessors, and rather charming
as well, Clapet and Co.’s cold-hearted scheme is thrown for a loop.
Things get especially complicated when Clapet’s much-adored daughter
Julie ends up falling in love with Louison, and turns to the renegade
underground vegetarian Troglodistes for aid in rescuing Louison from her
butcher father.
Review
Art-house foreign flicks have a terrible
tendency to aim for depth, and come off merely as pretentious, so it’s
no small wonder that so many people equate subtitles with guaranteed
snores. And when the film’s premise is as flat-out bizarre as that of
Jeunet and Caro’s cult classic Delicatessen, well, I’d wager
it’s safe to say that a fair number of less adventurous movie-viewers
would write off Delicatessen as merely another hoity-toity,
snooze-inducingly boring piece of cinematic drivel masquerading as high
art. This, of course, is a sad, sad thing indeed, because if there’s
one thing Delicatessen isn’t, it’s dull. Instead, this very
surrealist, wickedly black comedy is pure joy to watch from start to
finish. It’s a magical mix of the sublime and the macabre, balancing
it’s rather dark story satirizing the depths to which human beings
might sink to indulge their gourmet tastes with a rather unexpected
childlike innocence that delights in finding the beauty in silly, simple
things – blowing bubbles, making music of squeaky bedsprings, a duet
between cello and handsaw. The earth may have been blown to bits, the
remaining inhabitants forced to resort to cannibalism, but despite it
all, there’s still music, and loveliness, and the fundamental decency
of people like Louison and Julie. With its fantastic (in both senses of
the word) set design and evocative, gritty look, Delicatessen is
an undeniable visual wonder, a gorgeous vision of a nightmare post-war
world, but its real charm rests in the fact that beneath all that
darkness, there’s this irrepressible optimism that continually pushes
its way to the surface.
—reviewed by
Y. Sun
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