dir. Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991
Straight up: European films can be hard to watch. There is little that is inherently different, of course, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, except for perhaps their impressively relaxed attitude to public nudity and inexplicable love of slapstick humour. But for some reason, everyone hates the film buff who whips out his Jean-Luc Godard collection at a party and tortures everyone with 6 hours of nouvelle vague. Why? Well, It’s not only the subtitles and the often ass-numbing running time, but also the fact that all the Euroflicks that manage to leapfrog the Channel only manage to do so on some very pretentious backs. This has the unfortunate result that our misguided impression of European cinema is one of hideous convolution and self-conscious introspection.
So straight up? Delicatessen is not one of those films. In fact, it’s a massively enjoyable story of awkward love, failed suicide and human meat pate. The movie is set in an alternative French past, in which an unnamed apocalypse has crippled the nation’s food supply. In the rural commune in which the film is set, grain is used as an alternative currency, but the real luxury has become human meat, supplied by the violent owner of the eponymous deli, Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). Naïve ex-circus performer Louison (Dominique Pinon) arrives to fill in the vacancy at the deli left by his digested predecessor, and soon strikes up relationships with the eclectic inhabitants of the apartments above the shop, including Clapet’s shy daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac).
Seemingly filmed not so much in sepia tone as in the middle of a nightmarish smog, with every scene drenched in burnt-out yellow, the pervasive atmosphere is one of heated and unhinged surrealism, even when nothing particularly out of the ordinary is happening. It’s also fantastically French, from some disjointed accordion in the opening theme to happily smoking children and an army of frogs and snails. The performances are solid if not exactly subtle throughout, and as the plot progresses its fascination with death is represented by some hardcore set destruction.
Essentially, the whole thing plays out like a cogent and restrained version of Terry Gilliam’s hectic Brazil. The parallels (sane man in an insane world, the resistive power of love) are sometimes hard to ignore if you’re in any way familiar with Gilliam’s movie, but such themes are hardly original in any case, and Delicatessen’s upbeat ending leaves a much more pleasant taste in the mouth than Brazil’s 1984-lite copout. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t get it all 1st time, and God knows I didn’t, but you don’t need to – just enjoy its willful idiocy, its glorious fantasy and its uniquely Gallic charm.