Jean-Pierre Jeunet's crowded, carefully coloured fantasies are worth visiting for their physical comedy and peculiar domestic detail. We admire the precision, though the effort to keep inventing can leave the story short of attention.
Fi1m perspective
In Delicatessen (1991), a butcher's trade in human flesh sits alongside the routines of a residential building. Nobody needs to announce how peculiar this is; the comedy depends on people getting on with it. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and co-director Marc Caro make that domestic acceptance both funny and unpleasant. We laughed and were uneasy about laughing, because the butcher's business had been made to seem so ordinary. The people living here have stopped being horrified, which gives the joke time to work.
The crowded images need someone to know when a joke has had its moment, and editor Hervé Schneid supplies that judgement. His brisk cutting gives the physical comedy its rhythm and lets each fresh absurdity surprise us. Jeunet is equally particular about actors' timing and placement within the frame. His preference for expressive faces and stylised performances makes sense in films so carefully arranged. He favours short lenses and exaggerated colour, but the timing matters just as much as the appearance of these carefully constructed places.
The partnership with Caro continued through The City of Lost Children (1995), another dark fantasy, before Jeunet went to Hollywood for Alien Resurrection (1997). His return to France brought Amélie (2001), with a sweeter tone and a carefully recreated Paris. A Very Long Engagement (2004) took his visual style into a First World War drama.
Delicatessen is worth seeing for its comedy, though its screenplay, by Jeunet, Caro and Gilles Adrien, is thin. There is more comic business than story to hold it together. Some inventions arrive before we have finished enjoying the last, and the mounting grotesquerie costs the film some of its lighter humour. Jeunet can seem too anxious to give us another clever thing when what he already has would do. Start with Delicatessen, and allow a little patience for a film so determined to keep us amused.
Biography
Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a French film director and screenwriter. Born on 3 September 1953 in Roanne, Loire, he bought his first camera at the age of 17 and made short films while studying animation. He met designer and comic-book artist Marc Caro at an animation festival in the 1970s; the pair collaborated on award-winning animated shorts and advertisements before their first live-action short, The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981).
Jeunet and Caro co-directed their debut feature Delicatessen (1991), which Jeunet also co-wrote. The black comedy was followed by The City of Lost Children (1995). Jeunet later directed Alien Resurrection (1997), Amélie (2001), A Very Long Engagement (2004) and Micmacs (2009).
