Delicatessen (1991)
(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) To fans of writer-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s later movies, his debut feature Delicatessen is an early but very familiar demonstration of his unique talents. From the get-go, it’s obvious that the visual polish of the story will be astonishing—it not only takes place in a fantastical setting, but Jeunet’s predilection for unpredictable directing—hopping from closeups to slow revelations of the scene, expressionistic depictions and visual jokes. There is also, crucially, a refusal to stick to an expected tone. For a movie whose plot is based on accepted cannibalism, Delicatessen is far funnier, far more sentimental, and quite a bit less repulsive as one would expect. Jeunet doesn’t forget who’s the hero to cheer for and who’s the villain to hiss at, and with Dominique Pinon playing an earnest young man moving into an apartment building where new guests are often butchered and sold to other tenants, we have a moral centre to cheer for. It also helps that Marie-Laure Dougnac couldn’t possibly be cuter as the young woman who ends up taking a liking to the hero. Strange visuals are backed by an equally important attention paid to the soundscape of the film. From the first twenty minutes, two primarily sound-driven sequences affirm that this is the kind of movie that benefits from a keen ear. The result is weird, highly enjoyable, often spectacular. Delicatessen has aged admirably well, or perhaps not at all—the advantage of Jeunet’s off-beat but polished approach is it stands out of time, feeling as fresh in 1991 as in 2019. It’s quite a movie, and it’s almost essential viewing to anyone with a yearning for a complete audio-visual movie experience.