Thoughts on Delicatessen

    On Tubi, I watched Delicatessen, a 1991 French black comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, and co-written by Jeunet, Caro, and Gilles Adrien. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic France, possibly during the 1950s, focusing on the tenants of a dilapidated apartment building. Food is in short supply, and grain is used as currency. The landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) works as a butcher in his shop on the first floor, and posts job opportunities for handymen, so he can lure unsuspecting men to his building and butcher them and sell them to his tenants as cheap meat.

    The next applicant for the vacant position is the circus clown Louison (Dominique Pinon), who is handy with fixing things around the building and has a trick knife/boomerang he calls the "Australian." Clapet is reluctant to murder him so soon because of his usefulness, and he develops a cute romance with Clapet's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). The other tenants know they are eating people and are resigned to it for survival, but like Louison too for his charms.

    I first saw this movie as a teenager in the 1990s, and really liked how bizarre and weird it is. The film has a yellow and sepia-toned look to it, making the colors look like vomit, with a lot of wide angle shots and exaggerations and cartoonish humor, like with a group of underground mole people who come into the last third of the movie and take over the film. There's a fun sequence of simultaneous noises like the bed squeaking from sex, Julie playing the cello with her bow, and other tapping sounds as a calamity of sounds, with credit to the sound designer and editor. There's an ongoing joke of one of the tenants trying to die by suicide with elaborate Rube Goldberg setups (like sitting in the bathtub beside a sewing machine attached to a string attached to other things attached to a doorbell in hopes that her lover will ring the buzzer triggering the action to kill her). I love the date scene where Julie is preparing to mime pouring tea for Louison and practicing what to say, and when she tries to do the date without her glasses and Louison has to keep saving her from overpouring the tea and catching her mistakes because of her nearsighted blurry vision. It's an oddball movie that works really well with the vision that Jeunet and Caro put forth. 

    The two would collaborate again on 1995's The City of Lost Children, before parting on their separate creative ways, with Jeunet becoming the more well-known name with directing 1997's Alien: Resurrection, 2001's Amelie and 2004's A Very Long Engagement. Marc Caro has worked as an art director, often collaborating with Jan Kounen on his films.

    I love how creative and beautiful and strange this film is, and the romance between Louison and Julie is so sweet and cute amidst the madness. I'm really glad I revisited this film and understood it a lot better in my older age.