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Delicatessen (1991)

Posted By: Someonelse
Delicatessen (1991)

Delicatessen (1991)
DVD9 (VIDEO_TS) | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | 01:39:20 | 6,80 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English, Spanish
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy | Nominated for BAFTA Film Award | France

The story is centered on a microcosm of a post-apocalyptic society where food is so rare it's invaluable and is used as currency. The story centers on an apartment building with a delicatessen on the ground floor. The owner of the eatery also owns the apartment building and he is in need of a new maintenance man since the original "mysteriously" disappeared. A former clown applies for the job and the butcher's intent is to have him work for a little while and then serve him to quirky tenants who pay the butcher in, of course, grain. The clown and butcher's daughter fall in love and she tries to foil her father's plans by contacting the "troglodytes", a grain eating sub-group of society who live entirely underground. The "trogs" are possibly the most sensible of the lot, as they see food as food and not money.

IMDB

Cannibalism serves as a potent metaphor for social oppression in DELICATESSEN, the darkly stylish feature debut by French animators Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro.

This surreal, blackly comic fable is set in a run-down apartment building sometime in a dystopian future. The landlord of the building also runs the butcher shop on the ground floor, and keeps his tenants supplied with meat by chopping up hapless applicants for the job of building superintendent. The problem is that the butcher's mousey, nearsighted daughter, Julie Clapet (Marie-Laure Dougnac), keeps falling in love with these sirloins-to-be. In the past, gastronomical necessity has overcome romantic yearning. However, she insists that the newest arrival, Louison (Dominique Pinon, who made such an indelible impression in Jean-Jacques Beineix's DIVA), is different. The butcher doesn't believe her, but something makes him hold off from doing in the newest superintendent until well after the neighbors begin complaining about the lack of meat in their diet.

Delicatessen (1991)

DELICATESSEN is not as grisly as its premise might suggest. Much of the mayhem and violence takes place offscreen, and the main stylistic influences are Carne, Prevert, Dali and Bunuel, rather than Tobe Hooper. Carno and Jeunet construct a series of vignettes–some hilarious, some grotesque–of the tenants, often as seen through the eyes of two spying little boys. They include an old man who keeps his basement apartment flooded to raise escargots (one of the slimiest scenes in screen history); a prim matron who hears mysterious voices–actually a malicious upstairs neighbor speaking through the building vents–telling her to do away with herself (something she attempts, via a series of elaborate Rube Goldberg-style set-ups); and two brothers who support themselves by constructing moo-ing noisemakers. Into this bizarre, painstakingly rendered universe wanders the new superintendent, a former clown still mourning the death of his "partner," a chimpanzee who came to an ugly end when he was eaten by other members of their circus troupe. Though not for all tastes, DELICATESSEN is an ingeniously funny film with a surprisingly sweet romance at its center.
Delicatessen (1991)

The joy of watching a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie is in the complete, unique world he creates on screen. Even when he's portraying WWII France (A Very Long Engagement) or modern-day Paris (Amelie), his vision of these places is skewed to his own design in such a way that they appear as other-dimensional alternatives to the actual places. This trait was present in his films right from the beginning, and is arguably even more pronounced for the fact that the settings for these early stories are completely abstracted from the familiar.

Delicatessen (1991)

Jeunet's 1991 debut, Delicatessen, co-directed with Marc Caro, shows us a vision of one building in an unnamed French village at an unspecified time. Life has fallen on hard times, so much so that a leading paper is actually called Hard Times (a nod to Charles Dickens?), and it is the avenue by which our hapless hero, Louison (Jeunet-mainstay Dominique Pinon), is lured to the deli at the building's base in search of a job. The deli, and the boarding house above it, is run by Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who somehow manages to keep his cupboards full despite a worldwide food shortage. Consumables are so rare, lentils and corn have replaced paper money and coins.

Delicatessen (1991)

The big secret of Clapet's supply line is that he regularly hires new handymen for the building, and each of these ends up as a feast on his butcher's block. All of his eccentric tenants are in on the cannibalism, including the suicidal housewife, two men of an ill-defined relationship who make toys that simulate the moos of a cow, a hyperactive family of four, and a man who keeps his apartment damp in order to breed snails and frogs. Also living in the building is Clapet's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), a sweet soul who plays the cello and buys two of everything because her terrible eyesight leads to her destroying most of her possessions. She's having second thoughts about her father's business model, and when Louison–a former circus clown who lost his monkey to a ravenous mob–shows her kindness, she can't accept his heading for the dinner table. She enlists an underground organization of food rebels called the Troglodytes to rescue Louison, culminating in an insane night of slapstick and violence with everyone trying to stay one step ahead of the cleaver.

Delicatessen (1991)

Delicatessen is a weird movie through and through, but unlike a lot of quirky indie fare, the weirdness is never forced. Part of the reason for that is Jeunet and Caro's good sense to build their city from the ground up; another is their innate talent for visual invention; a third is their twisted sense of humor. It takes an especially morbid streak to see the laughter in cannibalism and build a romantic yarn around it. Once the directing team put all of these elements together, something spectacularly different and altogether fun came out of it. Darius Khondji's camera zooms through the apartment building, up and down the stairs, through the pipes, peeking in on each and every tenant. Jeunet and Caro have an obsessive eye for detail, packing the screen with small touches of delightful cleverness. By the same token, the sound effects are practically fetishized, cranked up to a high volume and squeezed for every juicy note.

Delicatessen (1991)

Though Delicatessen has a plot situation that would be right at home in an oddball sci-fi movie by other kooky directors like Terry Gilliam, the look of the movie has a syrupy nostalgia for the early days of television. All of the TV sets the characters watch are out-of-date models, and the programs they view all have a bygone innocence, usually nonsequitur song and dance numbers that play in ironic juxtaposition to the main action. (In one scene, as some of the supporting players dole out a little needed exposition, the black-and-white picture tube behind just shows the word "Interlude" with accompanying music; a fun little meta gag.) This fits in with Louison's former job, and the sad sight of the empty bandleader's uniform once worn by the deceased monkey ends up being a symbol of lament for a lost time. The schism in the world is much less about the days when there was food vs. when everything stopped growing, but more about a time when people were good to one another and enjoyed laughing at simple things vs. now, when anyone who wanders out on the stairs at night is fair game.

Delicatessen (1991)

Jeunet and Caro also love gadgets, and part of the fun of having a movie like Delicatessen on DVD is that you can watch it again and again and find things you may not have noticed before. From Grandma's rigged yarn recycler to Julie's disguised communicator for getting in touch with the Trogs and the Rube Goldberg set-ups that the suicidal lady concocts to get others to do her dirty business for her, there is always something to look at in Delicatessen. The brisk pace of the story rarely pauses to catch its breath, and so multiple viewings are practically required to keep up with all that's going on.

Delicatessen (1991)

Despite being a fairly pointless double-dip, this new DVD of Delicatessen is Highly Recommended. A good disc is a good disc, and a good disc of a good movie like this one can't be passed up. If you already own the old version, then you know this, and you've done your job, be content with being ahead of the pack. If not, then what are you waiting for? This oddball, darkly comic tale from Marc Caro and the visionary director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a gonzo depiction of a world where folks are forced to find alternative food stuffs and end up finding one another in the process–both in a romantic sense and in a totally non-romantic cannibal sense. Visually exciting and buzzing with a quirky energy, this slapstick-heavy film only gets more surprising with age. A must-have.
Delicatessen (1991)

Special Features:
- Audio commentary by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in French with English subtitles.
- "Fine Cooked Meats: The Making of Delicatessen," a thirteen-minute documentary showing the directors in action, including how they achieved the look of the movie.
- "The Archives of Jean-Pierre Jeunet," nine minutes of screen tests and rehearsal footage.
- A theatrical trailer and teasers for Delicatessen.
- A photo gallery.
Delicatessen (1991)


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