Delicatessen Reviews

Cannibalism serves as a potent metaphor for social oppression in DELICATESSEN, the darkly stylish feature debut by French animators Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. This surreal, blackly comic fable is set in a run-down apartment building sometime in a dystopian future. The landlord of the building also runs the butcher shop on the ground floor, and keeps his tenants supplied with meat by chopping up hapless applicants for the job of building superintendent. The problem is that the butcher's mousey, nearsighted daughter, Julie Clapet (Marie-Laure Dougnac), keeps falling in love with these sirloins-to-be. In the past, gastronomical necessity has overcome romantic yearning. However, she insists that the newest arrival, Louison (Dominique Pinon, who made such an indelible impression in Jean-Jacques Beineix's DIVA), is different. The butcher doesn't believe her, but something makes him hold off from doing in the newest superintendent until well after the neighbors begin complaining about the lack of meat in their diet. DELICATESSEN is not as grisly as its premise might suggest. Much of the mayhem and violence takes place offscreen, and the main stylistic influences are Carne, Prevert, Dali and Bunuel, rather than Tobe Hooper. Carno and Jeunet construct a series of vignettes--some hilarious, some grotesque--of the tenants, often as seen through the eyes of two spying little boys. They include an old man who keeps his basement apartment flooded to raise escargots (one of the slimiest scenes in screen history); a prim matron who hears mysterious voices--actually a malicious upstairs neighbor speaking through the building vents--telling her to do away with herself (something she attempts, via a series of elaborate Rube Goldberg-style set-ups); and two brothers who support themselves by constructing moo-ing noisemakers. Into this bizarre, painstakingly rendered universe wanders the new superintendent, a former clown still mourning the death of his "partner," a chimpanzee who came to an ugly end when he was eaten by other members of their circus troupe. Though not for all tastes, DELICATESSEN is an ingeniously funny film with a surprisingly sweet romance at its center.