Delicatessen Details

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	DVD: French
Subtitles	DVD: English
Released	DVD: 15 Apr 2002 Production year: 1991
Format	DVD