Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s macabre comedy is full of deft visual jokes and unsettling domestic detail. The story is thin and the grotesquerie sometimes overworked, but there is plenty here worth laughing at.
Delicatessen makes cannibalism the business of a residential building, then expects us to enjoy the company. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro largely get away with it: this is a funny, macabre fantasy whose crowded images and physical comedy compensate for a slight story. They are interested in how people continue their routines when the unthinkable has become commonplace. The result is worth an evening, provided a butcher dealing in human flesh does not settle the question before the film begins.
Darius Khondji’s photography gives the block of flats the exaggerated look of a comic strip, with the surroundings pressing themselves on our attention as insistently as the inhabitants. Production designers Miljen ‘Kreka’ Kljaković and Caro fill the building with odd details, giving it a cluttered, oppressive feel. The detail gives the eye something funny or disquieting to find, so looking around remains a pleasure. Even the domestic setting offers little promise of rest.
Hervé Schneid’s editing gives the physical comedy its rhythm, keeping the film moving briskly enough that each fresh absurdity has a chance to surprise us. We laughed and were a little troubled by how readily the laughter came. The butcher’s trade in human flesh is presented alongside domestic routines, and that casual proximity makes the joke both funny and unpleasant. Jeunet and Caro understand that a horrible idea can become funnier when the people living with it have stopped being horrified.
Dominique Pinon makes Louison worth following even when there is so much else competing for attention. His performance helps preserve the film’s childlike pleasure in make-believe, which matters in a comedy this fond of ugliness. Carlos D’Alessio’s score helps sustain the playfulness when the imagery threatens to become overbearing, although the music cannot supply the feeling the writing sometimes lacks. There is enough warmth here to keep the eccentric inhabitants from becoming nothing but targets.
The weakness is the screenplay by Caro, Jeunet and Gilles Adrien, which has more comic business than story to hold it together. As the inventions accumulate, some passages start to feel like an invitation to applaud another clever idea before we have finished enjoying the last one. The increasing grotesquerie also costs the film some of its lighter humour. A little less insistence would have helped. It runs 99 minutes.
Enclosed fantasy comedies often struggle to make their eccentrics matter once we have inspected them, and this one has the same difficulty. Its physical jokes are good enough to keep bringing us back, and the butcher’s business never becomes so oppressive that it stops being funny. The occasional overindulgence is worth tolerating for comedy with this much care in its timing and surroundings. We recommend Delicatessen to anyone happy for slapstick to arrive with something nasty still attached. It is probably wiser to eat first.
