Review of Delicatessen (1991) by Liz M — 03 Jun 2010

It's a strange French movie set in a dystopian sci-fi future when people are starting to resort to Sweeney-Todd-style cannibalism. It's also a fairly light-hearted comedy. The movie definitely reminds me of some of Terry Gilliam's work from around the same time period.

The story concerns a clown who moves into a new apartment building, but doesn't realize the landlord has a business of butchering the new tenants. He also manages to fall in love with the landlord's daughter during his stay.

The characters are all basically cartoonish, so nuance is not demanded from any of the actors. They all get more or less one note to play, but they all hit their notes fine. There are some funny recurring gags, such as the woman who constantly sets up Rube Goldberg-style contraptions in ridiculously complicated attempts to commit suicide, but always fails.

There's also a crazy man who lives in a flooded apartment filled with frogs and snails. The plot gets a bit muddled at times, and some of the characters are thinly developed to the point of seeming interchangable.

Everything is filmed in this weird yellow light, and the world outside the building seems to be covered in fog. The cinematography is good in that the images really stand out, but the fact that it's all one color gets a bit annoying after a while.

The opening credits sequence is cutely inventive. The movie was co-directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet; Jeunet went on to eventually make Amelie, everyone's favorite French movie, and you can see some of his visual style from that movie here as well.