DELICATESSEN (1991)

Country: France

Genre(s): Comedy / Romance

Director: Marc Caro / Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cast: Dominique Pinon / Marie-Laure Dougnac  / Jean-Claude Dreyfus

Plot

A butcher who serves up human flesh finds his next victim when his daughter falls for the newest tenant in their apartment building.

What I Liked

With dazzling cinematography, distinctive set design, painterly color schemes, and a quirky story, “Delicatessen” is as vibrant as motion pictures get.  A peculiar movie about even more peculiar characters doing still more peculiar things, the film is soaked through with idiosyncratic style yet never lets flash get in the way of the charming heart of its characters.  Laced delicately between all the menacing cleavers, bug-eyed close-ups, and kooky gags are moments of elegance, romance, and beauty. 

Though each apartment contains some of the strangest characters I’ve ever seen, they are portrayed so well by the actors that one suspends disbelief without knowing it.  That each character’s apartment seems its own insular world with its own natural, physical, and psychological laws endows the film with a sense of the fantastic, where the audience wonders what sort of realm they will enter as the camera jumps through doors and windows to spy on these terrifically eccentric tenants.

Flirting with and yet also breaking several genre molds at once, “Delicatessen” is a hard film to categorize.  Ultimately it is an unorthodox presentation of a very human romance, but nearly every scene has the twisted deviousness of the best dark comedies as well.  Interspersed throughout all this are very recognizable elements of fantasy, science fiction, and horror films.  The filmmakers never commit to a genre, instead preferring to carve out their own very distinctive niche to make their film always surprising.

What I Disliked

Nothing.  However, dark foreign comedies that don’t easily fit into easily recognizable conventions may not be something for everyone.  So those of you who like your movies no other way but straight forward have been warned.

Most Memorable Scene

In case I didn't make it clear enough, this entire movie is so unconventional that pretty much every scene, from it’s totally bizarre opening to its hilariously chaotic closing, brands itself on the brain.  I also mentioned earlier that at times charm and elegance punctuate the eye-popping style of the overall piece.  One of those moments is when naïve good guy Louison attempts to fix the springs of a buxom female tenant’s bed.  The pair wind up sitting on the bed side-by-side for a moment that not only perfectly characterizes the childlike innocence of Louison but is so enchantingly well-choreographed that it deserves equal regard with even Charlie Chaplin’s best moments.

My Rating: 5 out of 5