Review of Delicatessen (1991) by Paul Z — 03 Mar 2009

Delicatessen is pure creativity. I suppose you could say it is essentially a sci-fi film. That it is. But it meshes everything. Frankly, I know a way to sum up the film in a way that demonstrates its appeal: How many movies have you seen or will you ever see that take place in rural post-apocalyptic 1950s France? OK, a few. Wow. You really know your movies. Well just how many of them have involved cannibalism? I didn't think so, Leonard Maltin.

Consider a plot in which food is a stunted resource, in which grain is used as legal tender. The landlord of a dilapidated apartment building runs a butcher shop within, posting job opportunities attract people whom he butchers as an economical source of meat that he sells to his tenants.

The protagonist is an out-of-work circus clown played by the very strange Dominique Pinon who arrives for an available job. Taking up residence, he gradually falls in love with the bookish daughter of the landlord. Alert to her father's intentions and Pinon's pending murder, we of course anticipate the story's progression. Delicatessen rewards us at a much fresher degree than most movies, even ones better than this, as she goes down into the sewers to get in touch with a notorious vegetarian subgroup of rebels whom she convinces to help rescue our hero.

One reason I enjoyed the film is because, being a movie called Delicatessen with a picture of a pig on what is portrayed as a hanging butcher shop sign as the film's poster and DVD case image, it is in fact endearing for animal lovers like me. By the era depicted by the story, by the time the movie opens, animals have been hunted to extinction, and humans must suffer the consequences of such excesses at the expense of fellow creatures. Pinon's character mourns for his dead circus partner, his best friend, his monkey. The movie has a lightness of touch and does not intend to brandish a message at the viewer regarding a dystopian future, and we may accept the film however we wish.

This tongue-in-cheek Gothic fantasy is directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the same collaborator with whom he made The City of Lost Children, a similar film with incredible imagination and flair. There is an elemental charm to films like this, which entertain as sci-fi and action films are expected to, yet they surprise us so much more, because there is hardly a moment in which we can consider ourselves capable of predicting the next.