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Delicatessen
on DVD (1991)
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| 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: |
90 mins |
| Certificate: |
 |
| User collections: |
My French love affair, 10 great films for a rainy day, Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time, Top 10 of all time, An Introduction to World Cinema, Films to Capture the Mind, Films that opened my eyes, Great films to make you think about stuff..., Best dinner scenes in a movie, Top 10 Must-See Movies |
| Genres: |
Comedy, World Cinema |
| Languages: |
French |
| Subtitles: |
English |
| Released: |
15/04/2002
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Brief synopsis of 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.
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Related
Critics Reviews
Radio Times
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.
Los Angeles Times
"...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..."
Time Out
The near future: taking a job and a bedsit at a shabby rooming-house above a butcher's shop, ex-clown Louison (Pinon)...
Read more on www.timeout.com
See all 6 Critics Reviews »
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