DELICATESSEN Movie Review

In a post-nuclear future, the tenants of a dilapidated rooming house—including a group of militant vegetarians—do their best to keep from becoming dinner for the building's aggressively carnivorous landlord. A large-scale visionary fable distinguished by a polished and genuinely original visual style, this energetic tale of love and cannibalism from French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (The City of Lost Children, The Fifth Element) sometimes achieves a spectacular comic grace. A sequence in which Jeunet and Caro weave together the various sounds that tenants are making behind the closed doors of their rooms into a hilarious but grisly cinematic symphony is of near-classic stature, but the whole film works best (as much of the best grim screen humor does) when seen with an audience that's plugged in to the directors' temperament. While watching Delicatessen you may be reminded of some of director Terry Gilliam's elaborate fantasy films, like Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; apparently Gilliam himself was reminded of them, as he's listed in the film's credits as Delicatessen's “presenter.”

NEXT STOP … The City of Lost Children, Brazil, A Boy and His Dog

1992 (R) 95m/C FR Marie-Laure Dougnac, Dominique Pinon, Karin Viard, Jean Claude Dreyfus, Ticky Holgado, Anne Marie Pisani, Edith Ker, Patrick Paroux, Jean-Luc Caron; D: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro; W: Gilles Adrien, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro; C: Darius Khondji; M: Carlos D'Alessi. Cesar Awards '92: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Writing. VHS, LV, Closed Caption PAR, BTV