Delicatessen (1991)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
In a post-apocalyptic world, the residents of an apartment above the butcher shop receive an occasional delicacy of meat, something that is in low supply. A young man new in town falls in love with the butcher's daughter, which causes conflicts in her family, who need the young man for other business-related purposes.
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The film is set in and around a grubby delicatessen, the upper floors of which comprise an apartment house thats a kind of nightmarish low-rent cousin to the building in Roman Polanskis The Tenant (1976).
Jeunet & Caro evoke the silent comedies (though, like early talkies, their picture eagerly exploits sound effects) and German expressionism, as well as more recent "little man against the world" forebears like David Lynch's DIY Eraserhead and Terry Gilliam's Kafkaesque Brazil.
A punky, futuristic effort by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, it is a tasteless variation on "Sweeney Todd" set geographically near the border of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."
This is the type of movie I can imagine the director of Brazil and 12 Monkeys being very jealous of.
But Delicatessen, in addition to suffering from the same preening preciousness that made Amelie ultimately forgettable, also overdoses on its cartoonishly oppressive surroundings�a rapist mailman, food-snatching neighbors�all too repetitive of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and far less meaningful.
Jeunet & Caro evoke the silent comedies (though, like early talkies, their picture eagerly exploits sound effects) and German expressionism, as well as more recent "little man against the world" forebears like David Lynch's DIY Eraserhead and Terry Gilliam's Kafkaesque Brazil.