Delicatessen

[SirNewt]

Delicatessen

A film by: Jean-Pierre Juenet

http://media.monstersandcritics.com/articles/1162547/article_images/delicatessen8.jpg

For Madman, because I promised him this something like four weeks ago.

Jean Pierre Jeunet has crafted a supremely strange film in "Delicatessen" A film he's built from the remains of various pop and genre sources. He has pulled together no few bizarre elements. At Jeunet's dispense are: a dystopian future, a once circus clown protagonist, and cannibalism among others. The ideas, however, all seem carelessly embedded, in a, well, this is what pulp scifi horror is all about right, kind of way To his credit Jeunet attempts to animate this mass of gothic flesh with the lightning bolt of pro upbeat moral can-do-i-ness. But, this only flavors the story into something more befitting a network television Saturday morning time slot than a ninety minute feature.

Juenet's feature centers around a specific apartment building in a man-eat-man future gone wrong. The apartment is the castle and livelihood of our villain the butcher. From his street level Delicatessen, located inside said apartment building, he feeds his good tenants (those who can pay) literally from his bad tenants (those who cannot).

Into this scenario comes Louison, as endearing a hero as you'll find in film. He's lured to the apartment by an add in a newspaper offering room and board to anyone who will work as a fixer of bits and doer of odd jobs. The newspaper add is intended to do just that, to lure of course. Louison, however, does not become embroiled in petty tenant squabbles. He's a vegetarian and very endearing as I said. So with the assistance of the butcher's daughter (also a vegetarian) sidesteps the typical dynamics of man-eat-man apartment life. And so the narrative takes on a friendly patronizing attitude. A feeling that is heightened when an entire subterranean civilization of herbivores filled with even more upbeat can-do-i-ness than Louison are introduced. This is a simple dichotomy. It places the real, petty, and everyday cannibalistic carnivores against the passive freewheeling vegetarians. The film is rife with other juvenile attempts to further equate strange with good. (For example a scene in which Julie and Louison play a duet, Julie on Cello, Louison on wood saw would bring together odd and everyday but the instruments do not mesh and the analogy breaks.) It all reeks of the same shit we were forced to imbibe in grade school, the kind that usually comes in the form of colorful cartoons and anthropomorphic advice or worse, the kind accompanied by acoustic guitar.

All this, mind you is told very well. Juenet pays the genre pipers generously with a sound design that's selective rather than inclusive, The film overlaps and distorts a rich array of uncommon sounds to great effect including the replacement of expected sounds with the unexpected (at one memorable point, replacing a monkey squawk with a more vicious growl).

The camera pulls the story along nicely without following any trumped up rules or axioms. It performs every trick imaginable, explicitly acting as a tactile assistant to the actors. When not functioning to express character perceptions and plot realizations it is still, simply because it does not need to move.

Neither the technical aptness with which it is made nor it's quarky optimism make it feel genuine (hell, for Juenet , I hope it's not genuine). In pulling out Soilent Green, Brazil and many others it's only boring. The film feels as if it were derived from focus tests of Tim Burton fanboys and twelve-year-olds.

-5-

[monolith94]

I disagree with pretty much everything in this review. The only connection I can see between this and Soylent Green is cannibalism, and that's not enough to merit a mention. Where do you see the connection to Brazil?

And if this film is pandering, as you claim, who is it pandering to?

[SirNewt]

I disagree with pretty much everything in this review. The only connection I can see between this and Soylent Green is cannibalism, and that's not enough to merit a mention. Where do you see the connection to Brazil?

And if this film is pandering, as you claim, who is it pandering to?

Vegetarians, I don't know. Pander is not the best word choice. I'll try to think of a better word.

[monolith94]

I don't think this was a film trying to send a pro-vegetarian message so much as it was a film exploring a world and situation where in order to eat meat, one had to kill.

Unless one lives in a water-filled basement, of course.

[SirNewt]

I don't think this was a film trying to send a pro-vegetarian message so much as it was a film exploring a world and situation where in order to eat meat, one had to kill.

Unless one lives in a water-filled basement, of course.

Perhaps not but this is how I felt. To tell the truth I don't feel particularly confident in this review, despite the fact that I spent quite a long time on it. I just don't have the Bowly Crowther chromosome in my critic's DNA.

[monolith94]

I would put forth the idea that the film is not crassly trying to appeal to outsider by constructing a, as you put it, strange = good message. After all, many of the strangest characters, complicit as they are in the cannibalism of the apartment building, are not portrayed in any sense as "good." Our main character, despite being a clown, is portrayed, in point of fact, as a simple and decent man, odd only in his profession and overflowing measures of humanity. The film's love interest, Julie, is as normal as one could expect from this world fundamentally odd, this world turned inside-out.

Furhter I would argue the essential quality of the duet between Julie and Louison is not in fact strangeness, but again its humanity. It is so simple: two humans making a connection through a shared musical background. Perhaps morally its something you could present to elementary schoolers, but to me that speaks more to the particular scene's universality than to any particular lack of sophistication.

It seems to me that your chief offense are the troglodytes, admittedly the least-excellent part of the film. However, in terms of the film as a whole, they are so incidental to the film's meaning and themes (essential as they are to the plot) that to tear the film down to their perceived awfulness strikes me as silly.

[SirNewt]

I would put forth the idea that the film is not crassly trying to appeal to outsider by constructing a, as you put it, strange = good message. After all, many of the strangest characters, complicit as they are in the cannibalism of the apartment building, are not portrayed in any sense as "good." Our main character, despite being a clown, is portrayed, in point of fact, as a simple and decent man, odd only in his profession and overflowing measures of humanity. The film's love interest, Julie, is as normal as one could expect from this world fundamentally odd, this world turned inside-out.

Furhter I would argue the essential quality of the duet between Julie and Louison is not in fact strangeness, but again its humanity. It is so simple: two humans making a connection through a shared musical background. Perhaps morally its something you could present to elementary schoolers, but to me that speaks more to the particular scene's universality than to any particular lack of sophistication.

It seems to me that your chief offense are the troglodytes, admittedly the least-excellent part of the film. However, in terms of the film as a whole, they are so incidental to the film's meaning and themes (essential as they are to the plot) that to tear the film down to their perceived awfulness strikes me as silly.

Perhaps so. But I cannot help how I feel.