Marc Caro builds macabre worlds where even an ordinary room gives us something to laugh at or worry about. His work with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Delicatessen is richly inventive, though the story struggles to keep up.
Fi1m perspective
The butcher in Delicatessen (1991) deals in human flesh, and the building around him carries on with its routines. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet make that domestic indifference funny without making it comfortable. We laughed, then felt a little troubled by how easily we had accepted the neighbours’ habits. The jokes work because the inhabitants have stopped treating the horror as anything unusual.
Caro’s background in comics helps explain these frames, where so much competes for attention. He storyboarded every frame of his features and handled much of the artistic direction in his partnership with Jeunet. Their shorts included Le Bunker de la dernière rafale (1981), before their first feature together, Delicatessen. They followed it with the science-fantasy The City of Lost Children (1995), again co-writing and co-directing.
In Delicatessen, other collaborators make the crowded frames work. Darius Khondji gives the flats a comic-strip exaggeration, while Caro and fellow production designer Miljen ‘Kreka’ Kljaković crowd the building with odd details. The clutter is oppressive, but looking round it remains a pleasure. Hervé Schneid’s brisk editing gives the physical comedy its timing and stops the busy images from slowing everything down.
The weakness is the script Caro wrote with Jeunet and Gilles Adrien, which has more comic incidents than story to connect them. Some comic business feels included because someone has thought it up, rather than because the story needs it. As the grotesquerie increases, the lighter humour suffers. Those are real limits, but they do not cancel the pleasure of the physical comedy.
Caro’s first solo feature, Dante 01 (2008), places its science fiction in a space-station prison. His subsequent work has included art direction and shorts. For an introduction, choose Delicatessen, though perhaps finish supper first.
Biography
Marc Caro is a French film director, screenwriter and comics artist. He collaborated extensively with Jean-Pierre Jeunet after meeting at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 1974. Together they directed several animated and live-action shorts before their first feature, Delicatessen (1991), on which Caro is credited as co-director, co-writer and for production design.
Their second feature, The City of Lost Children (1995), followed. The pair parted ways professionally after that film. Caro later directed the feature Dante 01 (2008) and contributed to other projects as art director and designer.
