Delicatessen
(1991)
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After years of working successfully in commercials and music videos, French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet make a splashing feature-film debut, DELICATESSEN, a hysterical exercise in style. Scripted by comic book writer and frequent Caro and Jeunet collaborator Gilles Adrien, the story follows a sweet-natured clown, Louison (Dominique Pinon), who moves into a run down apartment building with a delicatessen on the ground floor and falls in love with the butcher's daughter, Julie Clapet (Marie-Laure Dougnac). When it turns out that Julie's father (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is actually butchering human beings and selling the meat to the carnivorous tenants of the building, Julie must decide if she will remain loyal to her father's business or expose the truth in order to save Louison from being the next victim. Taking place entirely inside, underneath, and on the roof of the delicatessen, the film uses an old pipe that runs throughout the building as a channel of communication for its characters. |
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro made their feature debut with this gloriously surreal comedy. Rarely can a film have had so many disparate influences. In addition to the visual inspiration of French comic books and the eccentricity of Heath Robinson, there are references to the poetic realism of Marcel Carné and René Clair, as well as the darker visions of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam. The gallery of grotesques gathered at butcher Jean-Claude Dreyfus's tenement participates in some of the funniest set pieces of recent years, most notably the deliriously unerotic sex scene and Sylvie Laguna's preposterous suicide attempts. Bizarre, brilliant, but wayward in its denouement.