Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13942 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-04-15
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Delicatessen presents a post-apocalyptic 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 the new tenant (French comic actor Dominque Pinon) who's got the hots for the butcher's near-sighted daughter. Delicatessen is a feast (if you will) of hilarious vignettes, slapstick gags, and sweetly eccentric characters, including a man in a swampy room full of frogs, a woman doggedly determined to commit suicide (she never gets it right) and a pair of brothers who make toy sound boxes that "moo" like cows.

It doesn't amount to much as a story, but that hardly matters; this is the kind of comedy that leaps from a unique wellspring of imagination and inspiration, and it's handled with such visual virtuosity that you can't help but be mesmerised. French co-directors of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro have wildly inventive imaginations that gravitate to the darker absurdities of human behaviour, and their visual extravagance is matched by impressive technical skill. There's some priceless comedy here, some of which is so inventive that you may feel the urge to stand up and cheer. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

On the DVD: the special features are pretty standard, with a trailer, "making of" featurette and footage of the rehearsal process. The audio commentary is supplied by Jeunet, which, although interesting, is in French and thus necessitates the use of subtitles which then obliterate the movie's own subtitles. Once the commentary is on it is virtually impossible to turn this option off without reloading the disc. However, the Dolby stereo works wonders for this film, which is rich in sound, and surprisingly the 1.85:1 letterbox ratio is perfect for a film that is grainy by design. --Nikki Disney

Special Features
French
Region 2
English

Synopsis
After years of working successfully in commercials and music videos, French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet make a splashing feature-film debut, DELICATESSEN, a hysterical exercise in style. Scripted by comic book writer and frequent Caro and Jeunet collaborator Gilles Adrien, the story follows a sweet-natured clown, Louison (Dominique Pinon), who moves into a run down apartment building with a delicatessen on the ground floor and falls in love with the butcher's daughter, Julie Clapet (Marie-Laure Dougnac). When it turns out that Julie's father (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is actually butchering human beings and selling the meat to the carnivorous tenants of the building, Julie must decide if she will remain loyal to her father's business or expose the truth in order to save Louison from being the next victim. Taking place entirely inside, underneath, and on the roof of the delicatessen, the film uses an old pipe that runs throughout the building as a channel of communication for its characters.
Caro and Jeunet have a flair for visual communication and comedy that overflows in DELICATESSEN, keeping viewers engaged in the film even when the style seems to swallow the plot. In one of the most mimicked scenes of the 1990s (most notably in commercials), the directors brilliantly choreograph a bizarre event in which the separate activities of each of the hotel's tenants--a couple making love in a squeaky bed, a man painting his ceiling, a woman playing the cello--become hilariously rhythmic and synchronised. This scene spawned an entirely new cinematic language, making DELICATESSEN one of the most auspicious directorial debuts of the 1990s.

Customer Reviews

C'est magnifique. Surreal and so unreal....
On its release, this French film caused much interest and praise due to its freshness and vitality. The joint debut of directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet has distinctive visual style, a surreal yet clever plot, hilarious comic pieces and comedy timing making it a delightful, colourful, imaginative film of many surprises that refuses to become classified within any genre. You want the plot? You sure? Some time in the future, society has begun to collapse. A circus performer, Louison, gratefully takes a room in an apartment block owned by butcher Clapet as it’s advertised as being rent free in return for odd jobs. He encounters the building’s offbeat tenants such as the toy making Cube brothers, Aurore Interligator - who hears voices urging her to commit suicide and Mr Potin who lives in a water filled room filled with frogs and snails which he dines upon. The offer of free rent is just a trick to lure people who Clapet then butchers and sells off as meat to the other tenants. However, his shy daughter Julie falls in love with Louison and decides to save him - something that requires her to make a deal with the Trogolodists, the vegetarian terrorists that live in the sewers. Did I mention surreal? OK, so there’s the ‘plot’. For me, the beauty and magic of ‘Delicatessen’ is to just sit back, watch and enjoy the unexpected and hilarious pleasures unfold. An inventive film experience - an adventure, a comedy and a sheer joy to savour as it sparkles with originality.

The special extras are real bonus features that add so much to the collectability of this little gem. The movie itself is in French or German, Italian or Spanish Audio Dialogue with choices of English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish Subtitles. The aforementioned special features are a fasinating Director’s Commentary from Jeunet; ‘Making Of’ Feature (Fine Slices (and delicacies) From Diane Bertrand); Archive Footage ‘From the Archives of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’; 6 Teasers and a Trailer. It is rated 15 and is 95 Minutes of hilarious, eccentric, innovative cinema. I loved every one of those minutes.

A Trivia fact: Caro and Jeunet next went on to make the equally eccentric and much loved ‘The City of Lost Children’. Jeunet was then tempted to U.S. mainstream on his own where he directed the disappointing ‘Alien: Resurrection’ before returning to France to return to his love of innovative and original film making with the enchanting Worldwide arthouse hit ‘Amelie’. Surprisingly, Caro has yet to direct another film to date.

Fabulously weird black comedy
This film is a must for those who like the weird humour of Amelie. But before I mislead you the style and black humour are the only links between this and Amelie. The film is set in a post-nucleur holocaust France, where meat is in short supply.
The response of the local buthcher shop is to provide a meat supply from the nearby changing clientele of a guest house (I'm not giving anything away here as the cover has a human head on a plate!!!) As I said black humour! The plot revolves around Dominque Pinon (Also In Amelie) as a new arrival to the guest house...
The butchers daughter falls in love with him causing an exciting, funny turn of events, exemplified by the a vigilante vegetarian group!
The film is a magnificent montage of different filming techniques, the use of colour and sound to convey the strangeness of the time.
Simply put it is brilliant, funny and a great way to spend an evening- even if it does put you off meat for a while!!!!

A veritable feast
A macabre little fantasia from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who would go on to make "Amelie" and "A very long engagement"). He uses a simple plot device. Let this be a France which has succumbed to some dystopian nightmare, which has slipped into a condition of economic collapse where there is no food ... and the currency has dissolved, leaving barter the only form of exchange. This is a world where a bag of lentils will take you places. Now, take a dingy, dank tenement block, set on its own ... maybe some distance beyond the outskirts of town ... maybe not. Fill its rooms with an oddball bunch of tenants. Let the tenement belong to a psychotic butcher, who remains in business by harvesting the handymen he lures into the spare apartment. Now, let's complicate the action: let the latest handyman be some scrawny little bloke, a former circus performer, and let the butcher's daughter fall for him ... and enlist the aid of the underground to try to protect him from her father's meat cleaver.

Like I say, a simple little plot device. It works beautifully. 'Delicatessen' is quite a remarkable little film. Shot on a low budget, it is exemplary for anyone wanting to make movies: it helps if you have talent as a director and can enlist a highly competent crew of technicians and professionals; you will need an excellent script; and a superb cast won't go amiss.

It's a lovely script. The test of a good story is how quickly you suspend disbelief. You are riveted from the opening shots. You absorb the notion that this is a world with no currency and little food, where, frankly, anything is possible. You settle to enjoy the film. And your attention is held by the cast. These are wonderfully idiosyncratic roles and worthy performances - you settle to enjoy beautifully imagined characters, created by a blend of excellent screenwriting and wholly convincing acting. The action is both plot-driven and character-driven - the characters enlist your sympathies and engage your sense of humour.

And the humour is beautifully choreographed - watch the scenes with the bedsprings!

Jeunet's world of 'Delicatessen' is an extravagant fantasia. He never explains what has gone wrong in the world. Life goes on. Two brothers earn an incongruous living making those annoying toys that moo like a cow! One voluptuous tenant works at the oldest profession. Another devises foolproof means to kill herself. Our hero, the new handyman, plays the saw and dreams of happy days as a circus clown. Everyone watches TV. It seems that the only industry to have survived is the entertainment industry ... or, at least, the slapstick side of it.

It's an ironic take on French culture. French cuisine has become cannibalism - doubtless the tenants know how to make a boudin or pâté out of human remains. At least one of the tenants maintains tradition, though - he breeds snails and frogs in his flooded apartment.

But who are the underground, the troglodytes who inhabit the sewers and who are portrayed as bringing down society? The reality is that this is not a film with a hidden message or cryptic critique of French society. It's not a film in which you search for meaning. Jeunet offers fantasy - quirky, droll, surreal, but fantasy. The fantasy exists not to elaborate some political message, but to sustain the story. It's a plot device - the fantasy provides the vehicle for the story of love and butchery. It makes the inexplicable explicable.

A fine, funny movie with a superb ensemble cast and great direction. A film to savour ... and to speculate on how much it influenced the 'League of Gentlemen'.