Delicatessen: A Surreal Apocalyptic Romp About Madness, Morality, and Locally-Sourced Meat - Reactor

Delicatessen (1991). Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Written by Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Starring Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, and Jean-Claude Dreyfus.

I had revealed embarrassing gaps in my cinema knowledge in this column before, so I might as well get another confession out of the way: I had no idea that the guy who made Amélie (2001) was the same guy who made Alien: Resurrection (1997). I’ve never seen Alien: Resurrection, nor do I have any particular desire to watch it, but I’m pretty sure that even if I had, I would not have come out of it expecting the director’s next project to be a wildly successful, broadly beloved romantic comedy full of warmth, quirkiness, and charm.

But of course, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s filmmaking career did not start with either quirky romcoms or blockbuster Hollywood sci fi. He started in a much weirder place with the pair of films he co-directed with Marc Caro: Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (1995).

We’re going to watch The City of Lost Children in some future month, but it is part of the story of how Delicatessen came to be. That story starts back in the ’70s, when budding filmmaker Jeunet met artist Caro at an animation festival. Caro comes from a French art tradition that will be familiar to regular readers of this column; he spent several years working as an editor on Métal Hurlant, the sci fi comics anthology that counts among its creators Jean Giraud (aka Mœbius), the artist whose work contributed to or inspired the look of so many sci fi films.

The first films Jeunet and Caro made together were stop-motion animated short films. I don’t know if it’s possible to watch the L’évasion (The Escape, 1978) anywhere, but there are stills of it on Jeunet’s website. Their second film, Le manège (The Carousel, 1980), is unofficially uploaded on YouTube. Even in a dialogue-free, ten-minute, stop-motion short, we can already see elements of both the themes and the visual style that show up in the their live-action films. The first of those would be the short film Le Bunker de la dernière rafale (The Bunker of the Last Gunshots) in 1981, a live-action experimental arthouse film that takes place in a grim futuristic setting.

Jeunet and Caro wanted to make feature films next. In a 2016 interview, Jeunet says they wrote the screenplay for The City of Lost Children (La Cité des enfants perdus) first but couldn’t get the funding necessary to make a retro-futurist science fantasy with a ton of visual effects. So they came up with another idea—one that wouldn’t cost quite so much. Jeunet was living above a butcher shop at the time, so when his girlfriend suggested making a film set entirely in a single building, Delicatessen was born.

Delicatessen takes place in an undefined post-apocalyptic time that sort of suggests a futuristic war but also recalls eras of the past. This is by design, as Jeunet and Caro treated the film as a way of tossing together a hodgepodge of inspirations, which include, but are not limited to the work of Looney Tunes artist Tex Avery, the films of Buster Keaton, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), and the work of photojournalist Robert Doisneau.

We never see the larger world in which this story takes place; we rarely travel far outside one crumbling apartment building. (That grim exterior was built as a model.) What we know is that there was some sort of cataclysmic war, and nothing will grow anymore, and people are so hungry that many have become cannibals. But society has not completely broken down, as there are still newspapers with want ads, taxis ferrying passengers around the city, postmen delivering packages, and televisions showing entertainment.

A former circus clown by the name of Louison (Dominique Pinon), who is mourning the violent death of his chimpanzee partner (played by Clara the chimpanzee), answers an advertisement for a job as a handyman at a half-collapsed apartment building located about Clapet’s (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) butcher shop. Clapet doesn’t actually want to hire a handyman. He just places the ads to lure unsuspecting strangers to the building so he can kill them and sell their flesh to the hungry apartment residents. He doesn’t kill Louison right away, and Louison strikes up a sweet, awkward romance with Clapet’s daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). Julie wants her father to spare Lousion, the building’s other residents are getting hungry, and everything very quickly spirals out of control in ways that are difficult to explain but utterly captivating to watch.

We’re operating under the flexible rules of dream-like absurdist surrealism flavored with the bleakest black comedy here, not the logical rules of rigorous science fiction, and that’s a vital aspect of what makes the film work. This is a movie that invites the audience along for a funhouse ride through the lives and eccentricities of people who can only really exist in a world this askew: the snail-covered Frog Man (Howard Vernon) in his damp green lair, the old men who spend their time manufacturing toys that baa like lambs (Jacques Mathou and Rufus), the despondent Mrs. Interligator (Silvie Laguna), who keeps building increasingly complex Rube Goldberg devices to attempt suicide. All of the tenants eavesdrop on each other’s conversations through the building’s pipes. A secret force of anti-cannibal vegetarians lives in the sewers. There is a slapstick accidental dismemberment. They eat Grandma.

And it’s all great. I think the whole film is great. I don’t care to interrogate whether it makes sense, because it makes sense the way that the weirdest dreams make sense. The story exists entirely within its own bizarre microcosm, and that place is so vividly rendered that we know at once we wouldn’t ever want to live there, but we’re happy to visit for the length of a movie.

I want to talk for a bit about the look of Delicatessen, because the setting, the color scheme, and the visual style are so very stunning. I’ve already mentioned a few of the inspirations Jeunet and Caro brought to the project, but an equally important element is the work of cinematographer Darius Khondji. You’ve likely seen Khondji’s work before. David Fincher’s Seven (1995) was his Hollywood breakthrough, and he would go on to work as cinematographer on a great many more high-profile films, including Alan Parker’s Evita (1996), several Woody Allen films that I will never watch because I don’t watch Woody Allen films, Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000), a few Michael Haneke films including Amour (2012), most recently Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025), as well as Ari Aster’s upcoming Eddington. My point is, Khondji’s cinematography is everywhere and has been for more than thirty years; he’s one of the people who has played a major role in defining the look of modern cinema. Delicatessen was not his first feature film, but it was certainly the one that made people sit up and pay attention.

Khondji was born in Iran but grew up in France, where he became interested in films and filmmaking at a young age. He moved to the United States to study film at UCLA and NYU, where he realized that he was a great deal more interested in the look of the films than he was in the story. In spite of being encouraged to go into directing, Khondji stuck with cinematography and focused on studying visual arts, photography, editing, and lighting. He has spoken about how he will imagine the look of the film not from reading the script but from speaking to the director (or directors) to figure out what they want it to feel like.

That approach is apparent in Delicatessen. Jeunet and Caro went into their film with several strong visual ideas. For example, they liked the look of movies that use wide-angle lenses in close scenes to accentuate characters’ features, such as in the films of Sergio Leone and Orson Welles. Khondji incorporated this style into how Delicatessen was shot but added to it his own ideas about color and light and shadow, much of which was inspired by a handful of realist American painters, including Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper (a perennial favorite of filmmakers), and George Bellows.

His goal was to keep the colors rich and powerful while maintaining a high contrast between lights and darks. To do that, Khondji adopted a technique developed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who worked as director of photography on films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1990). One of the techniques that Storaro pioneered in movies is using a method called “bleach bypass” or “silver retention,” which skips the part of color film processing that bleaches the silver from the film. When the silver is left behind instead of being removed, the result is a black and white image over a color image, which produces much darker blacks overall. It also tends to make the picture a bit more grainy, so it has often been used by filmmakers to achieve the look of old, archival footage. Storaro first used it on the Warren Beatty film Reds (1981) to mimic the look of period film footage, and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński used it on Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) for a similar effect.

Delicatessen isn’t trying to look like a historical news reel, although the costuming and set design are deliberately vintage, nor is it trying to wash out or desaturate the colors in favor of inky, impenetrable shadows. What Khondji wanted was a clean image with a combination of high contrast and vivid colors, so he overexposed the film slightly while using subtle color filters while filming. That gives the shadows a cool blue-green hue, which is what gives the entire film that unsettling greenish tinge. At the same time, all of the performers’ faces were lit with warm, soft light, so they stand out vibrantly in their many close-focus scenes.

I’m sharing all this nerdy detail (much of it from this very thorough blog post) because I adore the look of this movie, and that look is so important to the film’s impact.

The apartment building is surrounded by ruins and enshrouded in sickly fog, but the isolation is more than just physical. This starts right from the beginning, with that excellent credits sequence that has us sweeping over a pile of junk. The characters can and do go elsewhere, but it never matters what they do when they’re out.

What matters is what they do, and who they are, within the building, because that building is their world. The film uses a lot of tracking shots and traveling scenes to usher us through the building to move from character to character, and every stop is eerie in its own way. The greens of the Frog Man’s apartment, the sepia-tinged yellows, the mid-century olives, the occasional splashes of bright red—not in blood but in the women’s dresses or in home décor—it’s all part of the immersive, almost clingy, feeling of the setting. The overall effect is one of discomfort, even disgust, but more than that it’s fascinating, which contributes to the heightened tension that underscores the entire film.

All of these characters exist in a delicate balance where they are complicit in doing something terrible for their survival. The threat of hunger and precariousness of survival means that the act of killing and eating the new tenants occupies a significant part of their lives. They gossip about it, they speculate it about, they harbor petty grievances about it—but they don’t do anything to change it, not until Louison’s arrival disrupts that tense balance.

That’s all it takes. This is a quintessential “a stranger comes to town” movie plot, because one unexpected arrival is all it takes to topple the delicate balance in the apartment building. That balance requires everybody to be in agreement about what they are doing and why. They have a system, but Julie’s fondness for Louison disrupts it. They have rules about who is safe and who is food, but those rules break down when the grandmother of the Tapioca family becomes the butcher’s next target. The butcher keeps the tenants desperately hungry, but he hordes food in his cellar and has the resources to buy treats for Julie. There are breathless news articles about the feared Troglodytes terrorizing the city, but it turns out they are bumbling but well-meaning freedom fighters who really just want people to not eat each other.

Right there with the gallows humor and surrealism and weirdness of Delicatessen is that meaty (pun absolutely intended) thematic core: an exploration of all the ways in which morality gives out when people are desperate, and all the ways people will justify terrible choices to themselves. The micro-society within the apartment building was never truly stable or balanced or fair. They were all only pretending for as long as they could, because it was easier and safer than the alternatives. They live in a bizarro funhouse-distorted world, but their choices are just mundane enough to be both understandable and deeply uncomfortable.

The film isn’t really asking the audience to consider what we would do in such a situation. It’s making a statement instead, a wry and cynical statement about how a great many very ordinary people who believe themselves to be making rational and defensible choices can and will do shockingly cruel and dehumanizing things on a daily basis, just as long as all their neighbors are doing it too.

What do you think of Delicatessen? What’s your favorite part? I have a theory about an unintentional cinematic universe: I think Delicatessen and Eraserhead take place in the same surreal, unsettling, slightly-out-of-time urban world. I just made that theory up and have no support for it, but I am committed to it.

Next week: Let’s go to the waning days of the Soviet Union for Kin-dza-dza!, a parody about space travel and contact with extraterrestrial life. Watch it on Amazon, Hoopla, several streaming services I’ve never heard of, and the Mosfilm YouTube channel.  (A note about the online sources: I first watched it on Amazon and the subtitles were so out of sync with the picture that it was sometimes hard to follow, but that does not seem to be the case with the YouTube version. I don’t know about the other sources.)