Delicatessen

Synopsis

This smash hit futuristic comedy is a fresh and sublimely entertaining tale from French filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) and Marc Caro.

In a burnt-out city on the verge of collapse, a canny butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) employs various young handymen, kills them, and then sells them as meat. When ex-circus performer Louison (Dominique Pinon) arrives looking for work, it seems that his head will be the next on the block. But Louison falls in love with Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), the butcher's daughter, and together they join forces with an underground vegetarian group who plan to bring an end to the butcher's cruel regime.

After years of working successfully in commercials and music videos, French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet made a splashing feature-film debut in 1991 with this hysterical exercise in style, scripted by comic book writer and frequent Caro and Jeunet collaborator Gilles Adrien. 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 cinema (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.

French language with English subtitles.