Delicatessen

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Much is made on the keep case of this film coming from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of "Amelie." What isn't mentioned is that the director made the film a full decade before he made "Amelie," which is probably why it has never appeared on DVD before now. In any case, this 1991 surreal black comedy, "Delicatessen," is bizarre enough to warrant a look.

Jeunet has for years been one of cinema's more creative filmmakers, with movies like "City of Lost Children," "Alien Resurrection," and "A Very Long Engagement" to his credit besides "Amelie." So it's no surprise that "Delicatessen" is a little something out of the ordinary. Well, OK, the movie is downright bizarre. But it's fun.

The story is set in the kind of future postapocalyptic world that was so popular in movies of the 1980s and early 90s, only you won't find Mel Gibson anywhere in sight. Instead, you'll find that people have turned to cannibalism as a matter of course. They eat each other without much thought because meat has become so scarce.

Enter the butcher, Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), who runs a small delicatessen and rooming house in a bombed-out French suburb. He finds a steady market for his "product," the local townspeople trading beans, corn, and clothing for the meat he serves up. Only the meat is human. The butcher recruits new victims by placing advertisements in the newspaper for someone to work as a handyman, with payment in room and board. Then, after the applicant moves in, the butcher kills him and divides the meat up between his tenants and his regular paying customers. Yes, the building's other tenants are well aware of this scheme, yet the only one who seems to mind is the butcher's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laurie Dougnac).

Jeunet says on the commentary track that he got the idea for the picture when he and his fiancée heard some chopping noises in the flat above theirs. She teasingly said it sounded like somebody chopping up the tenants and that the murderer would be coming after them next. Jeunet took it from there.

Anyway, enter Louison, a former circus clown played by the wonderfully rubber-faced Dominque Pinion. Louison answers Clapet's ad, taking a job and a room from the butcher, not knowing he is being groomed as fodder for the rest of the tenants. Louison used to be part of the circus act of Stan and Livingstone, until the country went mad and people ate his partner.

Now, here's the thing: Not long after Louison's arrival, the butcher's daughter falls for him. Their best scene together concerns the first time she invites him to her room for tea. She's nearsighted, but she takes her glasses off to impress him, with comically disastrous results ("I buy two of everything because I break things," she tells him). Moreover, she knows what her father is up to, and she tries to warn and save her new friend, incidents that make up the bulk of the story.

The rest of the film concerns various oddball characters who live in Clapet's rooming house: His voluptuous mistress (Karen Viard), who is also attracted to Louison; a deaf old granny; two mischievous little boys; a man who raises frogs and snails to eat and literally lives with them in the cellar; a woman who hears mysterious voices urging her to commit suicide; and a couple of fellows who make toy boxes with animal sounds in them.

Then, there are the Troglodists, members of a goofy underground movement, literally, bent on overthrowing the country's current regime and instituting vegetarianism. The whole thing--the atmosphere, the future society, the use of 1950s' style clothing and appliances, the listening through connecting pipes in the building, the peculiar characters--all of it reminded me of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," made a few years earlier. (In fact, I've read that Gilliam helped promote "Delicatessen" when it first appeared, which doesn't surprise me in the least.)

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