Delicatessen

Directors: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (France). Year of Release: 1991

A burned out building at night – or maybe it’s just the fog which is making everything look so dark. The sign on the front door says “Delicatessen”, but it’s more a down market butcher’s. Inside, someone is sharpening his knife. A man tries to hide himself inside a rubbish bin, covering himself with brown paper. The binman arrives and takes out some of the rubbish, but it’s too late. The butcher raises his cleaver and brings it down swiftly towards the brown paper garbage.

Another man arrives in a taxi outside the shop. He is broke and pays for his cab fair with his shoes. He says he’s come for the job as a handyman, but the butcher initially denies that there’s any such job. The man looks too scrawny for what he’s got in mind. As the man starts to gather his luggage and make his way to the next possible job, the butcher changes his mind. He says there is a job on offer after all, and points the man to a room at the top of his labyrinthine house.

Who would live in a house like this? Let’s start with Clapet, the butcher who runs the shop downstairs. Clapet is a proto-fascist businessman who doesn’t let the lack of animals get in the way of providing meat for his customers. He simply puts an add in the paper asking for a handyman, welcomes said man into his house, then murders him and sells the meat for grain, which is the only currency going in this post-apocalyptic world. Well that, and sex with female customers.

There is also Aurore. who is plagued by voices telling her to kill herself. She sets up Heath Robinson type elaborate suicide machines. So, for example, she sets up a sewing machine which will cause sewn cloth to drop a lamp into a bath. Or an elaborate combination of taking pills, putting her head in both a gas oven and a noose, shooting herself, and setting off a Molotov cocktail. Needless to say, Aurore is never successful.

There are also the Cube brothers who make those devices which vaguely sound like an animal when you turn them upside down. There’s Mr. Potin who floods his room to breed frogs and snails, so he can eat them. And there’s the Tapioca family. Mr Tapioca repairs condoms and is encouraged by Clapet to donate his mother-in-law to pay off old debts. His kids sit at the top of the stairs, smoking and using a fishing rod to try to rob passers by.

But most important, there are Louison and Marie. Louison is a former circus clown, still mourning the death of his former partner Doctor Livingstone – a chimpanzee who was torn apart and eaten by a ravenous mob. Louison is the handyman who we see just after the opening credits. Marie is Claret’s daughter, a short-sighted and shy cello player who lives on one of the top floors of the building. When the two meet, an attraction develops.

One day, Louison intercepts a package for Marie which the neighbours try to steal because it contains confectioneries. As a reward, Marie invites Louison to a meal, for which she prepares by tracing her every step so she can remove her glasses and pretend that she has normal eyesight. This causes her to break a vase, but that’s no problem as she’s breaking things all the time and has a spare. Louison is charmed and later accompanies her cello playing on an electric saw.

Delicatessen is a fairly unstructured film, more a series of relatively unconnected scenes than a coherent plot. The first half consists of vignettes starring various tenants doing their thing. Then suddenly the tone of the film radically changes. Marie worries that her father will really kill Louison and calls on the Troglodists, a haphazard group of subterannean revolutionary vegetarians. As the residents attack, the troglodists make a half-hearted and inept attempt to save Louison.

For all the film’s incoherence, boy are the various disconnected scenes memorable. From Louison blowing smoke into a bubble inside a bubble to a protracted scene where a couple making love, a man painting the roof, attached to the ceiling with his braces, a woman playing a cello and a bicycle pump are all elegantly synchronised and choreographed, ending up with them all reaching some sort of climax. There is a lot of thought behind these apparently random lengthy scenes.

You could make a reasonable case that Delicatessen is a political allegory, but if you spend too much time on that level, you run into danger of missing the film’s main asset – it is both visually compelling and very, very silly. Of course, like Jeunet’s other films – like MicMacs and Amélie, this is a film which is clearly on the side of the underdog. But, much more than that, Delicatessen has a sense of incongruity and winning a cheap laugh. Which is, of course. A Good Thing.

I absolutely loved Delicatessen when it came out. I even loved The City of Lost Children, Jeunet and Caro’s hit and miss follow-up, and one of the first films I saw in a German cinema (the Corso Kino, Stuttgart-Vaihingen, one of the few benefits of having a local US army base). Then I saw Delicatessen a few years later on the telly. It was at best ok, and I felt let down. I honestly had no idea what to expect this evening. I’m glad to say that normal service has been resumed.

More than most films Delicatessen really depends on you approaching it in the right mood. If you’d like to dislike it, and pick out scenes which just don’t make sense, then you have plenty to pick from here. It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s silly, which is something it achieves in spades. And on top of that, if you’re prepared to look hard enough, it is also a call to look for the common decency in other human beings. Which is a bit uncool, but not a bad starting place.