From the film's beginning, you can tell Delicatessen is going to be different. The credits are written on piles of trash: old newspapers and the like. These are easily the most inventive credits since the days of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. And like the Archers' films, this one also has two directors, Jean-Marie Jeunet and Marc Caro.
The film is set in an apocalyptic future, after some sort of unidentified disaster (Atomic? Biological?). Nearly all of the film's action takes place in an apartment building which is home to a butcher and various eccentric residents. In a time when food is hard to come by, the apartment building always has a supply of fresh meat. Why is that? Well, let us just say that they hire a new caretaker every few days.
The newest caretaker is Louison (Dominique Pinon), a former circus clown. He goes to work right away, and takes a shine to Julie (Marie-Loure Dougnac), daughter of the butcher-cum-landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). Some residents are disappointed to see that Louison is so thin, since they are anxious for a new supply of meat.
I do not mean to imply at all by my plot synopsis that this movie moves in a linear fashion. No, the purpose of this movie is not so much to tell a story, but to create novel images and to play with sight and sound. Thus, in one scene, squeaky bedsprings set a tempo for everyone in the building, from Louison's painting, Julie's cello playing, an old woman beating a carpet, and a pair of men manufacturing novelty toys. As activity atop the bed (ahem) speeds up, so does everyone else's actions, until the inevitable breakdown.
In another funny scene, Julie invites Louison to her room for tea. She decides to not wear her thick glasses, and thus has to set everything just right so she can go without them. When Louison sits in the wrong chair at the table, however, all her plans go awry, resulting in spilled tea and numerous pratfalls.
The movie has its share of interesting supporting characters, such as a woman (Silvie Laguna) who just can't seem to commit suicide correctly, despite her incredible Rube Goldberg self-execution devices. Another man (Howard Vernon) raises thousands of snails and frogs in his room as his personal means of fighting the famine. It is a credit to the non-Hollywood sensibility that such characters not central to the story are given such copious screen time.
Julie knows that Louison's life is in danger, so she goes to all lengths to save him, including making a deal with a gang of subterranean "Troglodytes" to steal him away from her murderous father. The climax of the film, the escape from Clapet, represents a few confusing but visually enthralling scenes. At one point, Julie and Louison are trapped in a bathroom, and are forced to borrow a gambit from The Testament of Dr. Mabuse to get out. The ending of the film is on the hopeful side. Perhaps the world isn't doomed after all.
It is remarkable how much Jeunet and Caro do with so little. With only a dilapidated French apartment building, they construct an entire future world in the retro style favored by today's visionary directors and designers. It takes only a few rubber suits and goggles to create the mysterious Troglodytes, the Robin Hood and his Merry Men of the Apocalypse. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Jeunet and Caro know that when constructing a post-nuclear future, less is often more (although in City of Lost Children, they show that sometimes, more is more).
Of the cast, only Dominique Pinon as the smallish clown and Jean-Claude Dreyfus as the huge butcher really stand out. Technical credits are impeccable, particularly the painterly cinematography of Darius Khondji.
Jeunet and Caro follow in the footsteps of the Archers and Terry Gilliam as men who create unique, surreal visions in films that do not conform to any conventional genre. Hopefully, the unique qualities they bring to their French works will not be wholly subsumed by Hollywood convention. That would be a real shame.
Four stars
Copyright 1998 by Dale G. Abersold
