Delicatessen opens in a post-apocalyptic town where diseased-looking, yellowish fog hangs over the few standing buildings, isolating them into scrofulous pockets of humanity where atrocities can breed unnoticed. Perennial Jeunet feature Dominique Pinon naïvely enters one such pocket, a squalid, tumbledown tenement building under the sway of a butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) who's taken to advertising for handymen, then chopping up the applicants to feed his tenants. Most of the latter are outsized Gilliam-esque characters: a man living in a dankly flooded apartment, where he breeds and devours snails and frogs; a depressed woman whose suicide attempts involve elaborate Rube Goldberg devices; and Dreyfus' nearsighted daughter Marie-Laure Dougnac, who sympathizes with Pinon and awkwardly attempts to woo him.
As of Delicatessen, Jeunet and Caro hadn't refined the richly elaborate design that characterized their later collaboration The City Of Lost Children and Jeunet's solo directorial projects. The color scheme is artfully calculated but occasionally muddy, and the distorting lenses and quirky angles are more distracting than striking. But the filmmakers' inventiveness comes through repeatedly, in setpieces ranging from the opening credits (a long, winding pan through a trash-heap featuring the relevant names and titles) to a scene where the entire tenement falls into step with the rhythm of Dreyfus' creaking bedsprings. And their energetic surrealism keeps the film perpetually off-balance and lunging unpredictably forward. Eventually, Delicatessen descends into raw grotesquerie and excess. But first, it serves as an ample experimental field and proving ground for a wild talent that's thankfully become more disciplined with time.
Key features: Actor and set screen tests; a lively, informative Jeunet commentary in French, with subtitles.
