Brian C. Wyatt: Analysis of Delicatessen

Delicatessen (1991): un Film de Jeunet et Caro



Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro are long time pals with very exciting and diverse tastes: Jeunet is a filmmaker who likes to use wide-angle lens and cast unusual looking people into unusual looking roles, and Caro is a cartoonist with a penchant for mixing sound.

Set in a post-apocalyptic version of 1950s France, Delicatessen takes place in an apartment building which is situated atop a butcher’s shop. A contrasting group of bizarre neighbors eek out their sustenance in this famine-plagued world depending mostly upon the butcher Clapet who regularly murders the handymen he hires. Enter Louison, an unemployed circus clown whose late chimpanzee partner was just eaten recently by cannibals, who moves in and soon develops a romantic relationship with Julie the butcher’s daughter.

While trying to survive constant attempts on his life he is ultimately rescued by a vegetarian resistance group of cartoonish frogmen known as the Troglodists (Wikipedia 2007).

Jean Claude Dreyfuss (City of Lost Children, A Very Long Engagement) who plays the part of the tyrant butcher Clapet detested doing physical scenes such as swinging the deadly cleaver into the skull of the attempted escapee (Pascal Benezek). Dreyfuss however looks the part: tall, black haired, portly, “sign Gorilla, Bulldozer ascending” as his mistress describes him.

Jeunet likes to cast actors that fill his demand for characters who look unusual, cartoonish (e.g. Dominique Pinon who plays the clown cum handyman Louison) and have peculiar habits and behaviors (the nervous, sometimes suicidal ticks of Julie Clapet and Mrs. Interligator in Delicatessen – even Amelie’s mother in Jeunet’s later film possessed this continuity of behavior).

Darius Khondji (Se7en, Alien Resurrection) filmed Delicatessen using an experimental technique called ENR which “skips certain baths and intensifies others” highlighting contrasts and desaturating colors producing photography with a very pronounced character giving a slight monochrome flavor. This was less noticeable in the final American release which Jeunet deplored as “making the film look less interesting” (DVD 2002).

Three of my favorite scenes are:

1. Opening with a consecutive series of ever narrowing wide-angle shots the viewer sees a derelict building in yellow mist. We hear the sound of the butcher’s cleaver being sharpened and the sound of it carrying up through the arterial pipes of the multi-storied tenancy that the shop occupies. Through a series of lap dissolves in which the camera seems to travel up through pipe work (again in that weird yellow light) on into the boarding room of a nervous young man, bug-eyed with fear played by Pascal Benezek who was cast with his bug eyes in mind (DVD 2002). The opening credits are then displayed in one great continuous swooping shot displaying the names of the people responsible for this film on the butcher’s bric-a-brac.

2. About 15 minutes into Delicatessen is the sex scene which also doubled as the trailer for the movie. Difficult to mix, the parallel editing of multiple subjects had to be highly structured and planned in advance “otherwise it would have been impossible.” As a metronome sets time to bed springs the scene opens with Louison attempting to paint a ceiling while on a ladder, Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) repairs a bicycle tire, his wife beats a rug in the stairs, the brothers downstairs work on their toys, and Julie practices her cello all while Clapet begins to have great shifting sex with his mistress. As the timing of the bed springs increase so do the cuts between subjects and the focus on each one becomes more up close. Finally as Clapet reaches his own climax, his sweating, grossly ogrish face filling the screen, each subject’s own denouement is realized: Julie’s cello breaks a string, Marcel’s tire bursts and Louison falls from his ladder.

3. Potin’s Apartment, which we first see about 23 minutes into the film, is a surreal scene. Painted all green the apartment is flooded with water and crawls with frogs and snails while nationalistic music blares from an antique turntable nearby, itself festooned with a snail circling the center as the record plays. Old man Potin (Howard Vernon) naps in his easy chair while two of Tapioca’s boys attempt to net a green frog which is sitting atop a hat rack. Knocking it over the screen suddenly fills with the enraged face of Potin yelling at the boys to scatter; the next shot we see Potin mutter “every man for himself, and God for all” as he screws his fork into a snail and consumes it, tossing its shell in the next shot onto a ghostly white pile of other dead snails eerily reminiscent of Nazi-era concentration camps.
The film is gleefully French: the weird self-reliance of Potin subsisting on frogs and snails as well as the cartoonish frogmen of the resistance movement, the Troglodists (Marc Caro includes himself amongst them), are two very strong examples of French nationalism in Delicatessen.
Inspired by Jeunet having lived above a butcher’s shop, awakened every morning to the butcher sharpening his cleaver and his girlfriend remarking that the butcher was carving up their neighbors, Delicatessen won several awards including 4 Cesars, the main national film award in France (Imdb 2007).
Herve Shneid, who has edited all of Jeunet’s films, won a Cesar for “Best Editing”.

Works Cited

1. Delicatessen, Sofinergie Films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet director’s commentary, DVD 2002

2. Delicatessen, Sofinergie Films, 1991, Internet Movie Database, 28 Sept. 2007

3. “Delicatessen (film)”, Wikipedia, 28 Sept. 2007

4. “Jean-Pierre Jeunet”, Wikipedia, 28 Sept. 2007

5. “Jean-Pierre Jeunet”, Internet Movie Database, 28 Sept. 2007