Delicatessen (1991)

A single apartment block in a starving city remains functional after an undefined collapse of civilisation because the butcher-landlord (Jean Claude Dreyfus) rules a callous but functioning society which depends on the hiring of odd-job men who are fattened up and eventually turned into food for the eccentric, prissy tenants. The only people untouched by this meat-eater's corruption are the butcher's saintly daughter (Julie Clapet), a wistful but myopic cellist, and an old man (Howard Vernon) who has turned his cellar home into a watery swamp to support the two essentials of French cuisine, frogs and snails. The next prospective meal is Louison (Dominique Pinon), a former clown traumatised because a hungry audience has eaten his beloved partner, a monkey. Louison's basic humanity prompts Clapet to join him in condemning her loutish tyrant of a father, opening the way to an attack by a cadre of geeky subterranean vegetarian revolutionaries in waterproof coats.

Set in a Paris which might be a post-holocaust future but seems more like an alternate 1950s with its black and white television and chintzy music and decor, Delicatessen has bizarro precedents (Eraserhead, 1977, Eating Raoul, 1982, Big Meat Eater, 1982, Brazil, 1984, Life on the Edge, 1989, Parents, 1989) in creating of a self-consistent fantasy world that evokes the past rather than the future. It could even be seen in its vision of a decaying, cannibalist society as an extension of a little-noticed strain of French cinema that includes Themroc (1973), Le Dernier Combat (1981) and even Weekend (1970), but it's a delightful original in its tone, poised perfectly between farce and horror as a plot which turns of cannibalism and mass murder somehow manages to be quite jolly and good-spirited between the cleaver-chopping and liver-eating. The perfectly-evoked background world is a remarkably convincing fantasyland, full of lovingly assembledobjets trouvees and strange byways. The sinister undertones of much '90s French cinema come out in the open in this mainly bloodless but conceptually gruesome item, which presents a cross-section of society stuck together in the crumbling apartment block and lampoons them all, from the senile brothers who manufacture moo-cow novelties to the rich woman whose elaborate suicide attempts consistently backfire.

Pinon, the plug-ugly punk assassin from Diva (1982), is a quizzically charming hero, wandering around in clown shoes and resourcefully doing his best to stand by his gutsy but fragile ladylove in a nightmare finish that finds them both on the run from the cleaver-wielding butcher. The clown's heroism pays off with a trick borrowed from Stuart Rosenberg's The Drowning Pool (1976) as the couple are trapped in a flooding bathroom and Louison clogs up the drains so the water fills the whole room before exploding throughout the building, washing away most of the evil-doers in an apt deluge. Clapet's gamine is a fresh incarnation of the free-spirited but demure filles who pop up throughout French cinema from René Clair (whose shadowed but idyllic Paris is also evoked) on through the nouvelle vague. Acknowledging a debt to Euro-bizarre, the directors cast Howard Vernon, Jesus Franco's original Dr Orlof, in a rare semi-respectable appearance as the mad gastronome in the flooded basement.

Directors Jeunet et Caro, graduating to a first feature from a well-liked short film (Le Bunker de la Derniére Rafale, 1981, also co-written by Gilles Adrien) and a flurry of pop videos, show traces of the style-consciousness of their compatriots Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beneix, but also resurrect some of the light, albeit deep black, touch of Jacques Tati, with an officious French postman among the supporting cannibal characters and two priceless gag sequences built around creaking bedsprings, and have an unusal facility, perhaps derived from Renoir, to love all their characters, no matter how horrid. The enclosed world fractures towards the end as a the revolutionaries intrude upon the butcher's closed system, bringing with them cruder and less effective knockabout, but Delicatessen mainly keeps its balance, managing the mix of cruelty and charm far more successfully than such would-be similar items as Adam Rifkin's The Dark Backward (1991) and Alex de la Iglesia's Accion Mutante (1992).
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Fear

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