Delicatessen
1991
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, .. Read more
| Starring | Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Howard Vernon |
|---|---|
| Director | Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro |
| Genres | Comedy, World Cinema |
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Delicatessen
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.
Caro and Jeunet have a flair for visual communication and comedy that overflows in DELICATESSEN, keeping viewers engaged in the film even when the style seems to swallow the plot. In one of the most mimicked scenes of the 1990s (most notably in commercials), the directors brilliantly choreograph a bizarre event in which the separate activities of each of the hotel's tenants--a couple making love in a squeaky bed, a man painting his ceiling, a woman playing the cello--become hilariously rhythmic and synchronised. This scene spawned an entirely new cinematic language, making DELICATESSEN one of the most auspicious directorial debuts of the 1990s.
| Starring | Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Howard Vernon, Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado, Silvie Laguna, Jacques Mathou, Chick Ortega, Jean-Francois Perrier, Anne Marie Pisan, Rufus |
|---|---|
| Director | Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro |
| Studio | MOMENTUM PICTURES |
| Run time | DVD: 1 hr 30 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Comedy, World Cinema |
| Language | French |
| Subtitles | English |
| Released | DVD: 15 Apr 2002 Production year: 1991 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (6)
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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.
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"...DELICATESSEN is a fearsomely intense movie that mixes moods with formidable assurance....It's loaded with horrific images and macabre jolts that keep resonating eerily in your mind's eye..."
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Most helpful member's review
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106 out of 120 people found this review helpful
Rubbish
Don't waste your time.
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Most recent members' review
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4 out of 4 people found this review helpful
Customer Review
A macabre little fantasia from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who would go on to make "Amelie" and "A very long engagement"). He uses a simple plot device. Let this be a France which has succumbed to some dystopian nightmare, which has slipped into a condition of economic collapse where there is no food ... and the currency has dissolved, leaving barter the only form of exchange. This is a world where a bag of lentils will take you places. Now, take a dingy, dank tenement block, set on its own ... maybe some distance beyond the outskirts of town ... maybe not. Fill its rooms with an oddball bunch of tenants. Let the tenement belong to a psychotic butcher, who remains in business by harvesting the handymen he lures into the spare apartment. Now, let's complicate the action: let the latest handyman be some scrawny little bloke, a former circus performer, and let the butcher's daughter fall for him ... and enlist the aid of the underground to try to protect him from her father's meat cleaver.
Like I say, a simple little plot device. It works beautifully. 'Delicatessen' is quite a remarkable little film. Shot on a low budget, it is exemplary for anyone wanting to make movies: it helps if you have talent as a director and can enlist a highly competent crew of technicians and professionals; you will need an excellent script; and a superb cast won't go amiss.
It's a lovely script. The test of a good story is how quickly you suspend disbelief. You are riveted from the opening shots. You absorb the notion that this is a world with no currency and little food, where, frankly, anything is possible. You settle to enjoy the film. And your attention is held by the cast. These are wonderfully idiosyncratic roles and worthy performances - you settle to enjoy beautifully imagined characters, created by a blend of excellent screenwriting and wholly convincing acting. The action is both plot-driven and character-driven - the characters enlist your sympathies and engage your sense of humour.
And the humour is beautifully choreographed - watch the scenes with the bedsprings!
Jeunet's world of 'Delicatessen' is an extravagant fantasia. He never explains what has gone wrong in the world. Life goes on. Two brothers earn an incongruous living making those annoying toys that moo like a cow! One voluptuous tenant works at the oldest profession. Another devises foolproof means to kill herself. Our hero, the new handyman, plays the saw and dreams of happy days as a circus clown. Everyone watches TV. It seems that the only industry to have survived is the entertainment industry ... or, at least, the slapstick side of it.
It's an ironic take on French culture. French cuisine has become cannibalism - doubtless the tenants know how to make a boudin or pâté out of human remains. At least one of the tenants maintains tradition, though - he breeds snails and frogs in his flooded apartment.
But who are the underground, the troglodytes who inhabit the sewers and who are portrayed as bringing down society? The reality is that this is not a film with a hidden message or cryptic critique of French society. It's not a film in which you search for meaning. Jeunet offers fantasy - quirky, droll, surreal, but fantasy. The fantasy exists not to elaborate some political message, but to sustain the story. It's a plot device - the fantasy provides the vehicle for the story of love and butchery. It makes the inexplicable explicable.
A fine, funny movie with a superb ensemble cast and great direction. A film to savour ... and to speculate on how much it influenced the 'League of Gentlemen'. -
News and features
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Wait is over for A Very Long Engagement
- 27 Jul 2005
The talents of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Audrey Tautou are reunited in A Very Long Engagement, which comes to DVD from today. The pair had previously worked together on the highly acclaimed Amelie. Jean-Pierre Becker is another to be associated with both productions. A Very Long Engagement is set in the trenches of the Somme, towards the end of World War I. Tautou's character, Mathilde, plays the role of a young woman who tries to track down her fiance, one of five soldiers court-martialled and... Read more
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Delicatessen
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 ...
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