Review of Delicatessen (1991) by Diego T — 30 Aug 2013

Delicatessen is easily one of the strangest films I've ever seen, but that doesn't mean it's very good. Just being weird does not make a movie spectacular. This is a very artsy, stylish film that may entertain while you watch it, but is really too derivative of other deliberately strange films to be any good when you think back to it. It wants to be a homage to truly amazing and surreal cinema, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but it comes off as being more of a full-on rip-off than anything else. It's good for some incredulous laughter, but not much else.

Delicatessen is a French film about a dystopian future in which food is scarce and society is divided between low-life vegetarians and cannibalistic surface-dwellers. A butcher who specializes in human meat runs a... well... a delicatessen, and also has an apartment complex above his business. He uses the people who stay in his building as farm-fresh food for himself and the others. This is actually a really high concept that is unfortunately thwarted by an overall feel of needless indulgence. The movie just tries way too hard to be a cult film, and that is something I cannot stand. Cult films are not pumped out by studios, they are picked by audiences after a few years of watching them. The creators of The Big Lebowski, In Bruges, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show weren't trying to create cult hits; they just did so inadvertently. To try and mass-produce something as intangible and entertaining as a cult film is just fucking wrongheaded as fuck.

Delicatessen does have its fair share of high points though, the biggest being the style. The film's sepia tones and elaborate set design make it one of the most visually arresting movies I've ever seen. It's just a beautiful movie to watch, even if the subject matter is unsubstantial. The set is just a mind-blowing array of disgusting visuals and seriously awesome camera angles. It is literally a feast for the eyes. Your hunger for a complete Plotline may not be sated by the end of it, but you'll definitely have fun with the awesomely decadent eye candy.

Seeing as Delicatessen is (of course) in French, it is hard for me to judge the acting. But I will say that the subtitles were error-free! So... that's something. But really, people could have been doing anything during this film and I wouldn't have known better. Their facial expressions were good, and their body language was suitably over-the-top for a movie of this sort, but they could have been putting the emphasis on the wrong syllables or screwing up their lines throughout the entire film and no American would have been the wiser. But from what I could tell, I was particularly impressed by three performances: The butcher is first and foremost, as he definitely conveys the madness and desperation that one would have in a situation like his. The main character, a former clown who takes up residence in the building, is a seemingly good actor, but I found his ridiculous forehead somewhat distracting. But the butcher's daughter (and the clown's girlfriend) was damn good. She played the klutzy, shy, yet very principled love interest very well. Even if we've seen that character a thousand times... you know, the cannibal's daughter who objects to her father's insane practice as he slaughters the people in his apartment complex? It's a story as old as time.

The dialogue is inspired and very funny, and the whole thing is very quotable. Even though it sometimes sets itself up for certain scenes just for the sake of being weird, I can hardly fault it for wanting to include so many off-the-wall and great ideas. One scene, in which the butcher's daughter is trying to go on a date without her glasses, actually had me laughing out loud. This is quite a feat, especially when you consider the fact that I sat stone-faced through Shaun of the Dead. But really, the dialogue in Delicatessen is fucking inspired. I just wish that it was built around a movie that didn't seem to try so fucking hard. It gave me the feeling that the creators had no new ideas, and decided to just try to be as weird as Terry Gilliam's films because there was nothing new to do. It felt like a cop-out, and that lowered the score considerably.

Final Score for Delicatessen: 6/10 stars. It's funny, witty, and very well-scripted, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the movie's quirkiness felt a little too manufactured. This is definitely a movie worth watching for people going into set design, but it's really just a little too gleefully random to satisfy my taste. It pulls no punches in its weirdness though, which should entertain those who haven't seen the movies it's trying to be-- it throws together tropes and idioms from every genre and bundles them all up in a strange, technicolor nightmare that (although not too original) is still very entertaining. And really, that's all it wanted to do. I doubt that Delicatessen is supposed to be a masterpiece, but black comedies always get good marks from me. And this is the darkest of comedies.