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Movie: Delicatessen

Date: 1991

Category: Weird

Director: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Big Stars: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus

The title credit for Delicatessen reads "Presented by Terry Gilliam," and it's easy to understand why the director of Brazil was so supportive of this outrageously black French comedy from 1991. Like Gilliam, French codirectors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro have wildly inventive imaginations that gravitate to the darker absurdities of human behavior, and their visual extravagance is matched by impressive technical skill.

Here, making their feature debut, Jeunet and Caro present a postapocalyptic scenario set entirely in a dank and gloomy building where the landlord operates a delicatessen on the ground floor. But this is an altogether meatless world, so the butcher-landlord keeps his customers happy by chopping unsuspecting victims into cutlets, and he's sharpening his knife for a new tenant ( Pinon) who's got the hots for the butcher's nearsighted daughter.

Delicatessen is a feast of odd and funny vignettes, slapstick gags, and sweetly eccentric characters, including a man in a swampy room full of frogs, a woman doggedly determined to commit suicide who continually fails, and a pair of brothers who make toy sound boxes that "moo" like cows.

It doesn't amount to much as a story, nor hardly any dialogue, but that hardly matters. This is visual and expressive storytelling based somewhat on intangibles, timing, and fate.

Jeunet and Caro continued their surrealist visual storytelling style in the science fiction fable The City of Lost Children and Jeunet directed the 2001 love-story Amelie.