Delicatessen: Special Edition

DVD review (region 1)
Directed by Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Rufus
Release date Out now

Former circus clown Louison (Pinon) arrives at an apartment building for a job as a caretaker. But, unbeknown to him, the resident butcher, Clapet (Dreyfus), serves human meat to customers…

Meat really is murder in this wonderfully bonkers comic fantasy from Gallic duo Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

The subject matter is potentially bleak: set in a hazy post-apocalyptic future (or perhaps an alternate reality as the time period seems rooted in post-WWII France) in which food is scarce, the tenants in the film are forced to tacitly accept that their butcher chops up strangers and turns them into meat. But instead of being a blood orgy, Delicatessen is a rapid-paced romantic comedy that draws on the work of comic heroes like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Pinon is wonderful as the cheery, hapless hero, oblivious to what’s going around him and striking up a charming relationship with the butcher’s daughter Julie (Dougnac). The other assorted oddballs of the film are almost as memorable, including an old man who sits in a waterlogged, snail-ridden room, and The Troglodytes, a legion of bumbling underground rebels who pop up in the second half of the movie.

The set design – on a fairly limited budget – is simply dazzling, helping to create an original vision of a smog-soaked future that is strangely beautiful. Despite sharing the preoccupation with eye-popping visuals of the so-called ‘cinema du look’ (which was nearing the end of its classic period by the film’s release in 1991), Delicatessen trades coldness and cynicism for something much sweeter.

Many sequences in the movie have become rightly famous: the brilliantly edited sex scene that is intercut with the everyday noises of the apartment-dwellers; Louison and Julie creating sweet music with a cello and musical saw; Louison testing out the bed springs to the accompaniment of a dance on TV. But the entire film is a masterpiece of ideas and execution, and deserves to be studied to death by all aspiring directors.

For this Special Edition DVD, Jean-Pierre Jeunet provides an excellent commentary (the absent Marc Caro hates commentaries, according to Jeunet). He peels back every aspect of the creation of the film, and is refreshingly candid about the things he feels don’t work or they could have done better – you can’t help but feel he’s almost too hard on himself, as Delicatessen isn’t far off being perfect. Matt McAllister