Delicatessen (1991)
Movie rating: 8/10
“What the hell did I just watch?”
That was my first reaction after watching Delicatessen, a French “post-apocalyptic black comedy” directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. My reaction was by no means a negative one. The film revolves around butcher and landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who posts ads to lure workers whom he then kills and serves as a source of cheap meat for his tenants. A former circus clown, Louison (Dominique Pinon), responds to an ad and proves himself to be a skilled handyman, then becomes romantically involved with Clapet’s daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). Meanwhile, the Troglodistes, a vegetarian rebel group, live underground.
If I had to describe my feelings while watching this movie, it would be a mix of bafflement and amusement. Jeunet and Caro present a surrealistic, zany atmosphere with lots of off-kilter camera angles and fevered closeups. The tenants and Troglodistes are eccentric supporting characters who often have their own subplots, if you can call them that. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the old man who lives in a flooded room surrounded by frogs and a pile of discarded snail shells. Another tenant, Aurore (Silvie Laguna), spends the whole movie trying to kill herself. One of the funniest scenes involves her simultaneously attempting multiple methods of suicide, which all fail. Like I said, it’s a black comedy.
The romance between Julie Clapet and Louison is charming and funny. Dougnac is a standout and presents a sweet awkwardness, as in a memorable scene where the myopic Julie attempts to serve tea to Louison with her glasses off. The couple play music together: her playing a cello, him a handsaw (the latter sounds like a theremin ripped from the soundtrack of a ’50s sci-fi B-movie). As their romance blossoms, Julie attempts to enlist the Troglodistes to rescue Louison.
For most of the movie I had a goofy smile on my face just taking in what I was seeing. I admired the movie’s audaciousness, its off-the-wall spirit and twisted sense of humor. The brown-yellow sky of post-apocalyptic France—it’s never explained precisely what happened to create this dystopia—reminded me of real-life cities looking like the surface of Mars with orange, smokey skies due to wildfires fuelled by climate change. The world we live in often feels like a dystopia, so the setting of Delicatessen doesn’t feel quite as remote as it might have in 1991. With the increase in food prices due to inflation, supply chain issues and the climate crisis, it’s not so difficult to imagine a world in which people facing food shortages turn to, er, alternative sources of nourishment.
Having a villainous landlord as the chief antagonist also feels even more relevant in 2022, given the housing crisis and insane cost of rent across Canada. A landlord who literally murders people and butchers them to serve as meat feels like a logical step for this parasitic class that lives off the work of others. The Troglodistes, for their part, evoke the French Resistance under Nazi occupation. Making them vegetarians works very well as an opposition to butchers like Clapet. It’s a good metaphor for resistance to capitalists and the fascist butchers who defend this system in its deepest crises, such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, or increasingly our own era.
The love between Julie and Louison, her efforts to rescue him, and the resistance of the Troglodistes feel like the triumph of “the better angels of our nature” in a dark world permeated with despair and reactionary butchers. Of course, this is a more serious reading of a film that as a viewing experience is best described as funny, dark, and weird. It’s a movie out of left field, and that bizarre sensibility is precisely what makes it so memorable.