A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Delicatessen (Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)

Marie-Laure Dougnac and Dominique Pinon in Delicatessen
Cast: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado, Edith Ker, Rufus, Jacques Mathou, Howard Vernon, Marc Caro. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, Gilles Adrien. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Marc Caro. Film editing: Hervé Schneid. Music: Carlos D'Alessio.

Lovers of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie (2001) should be warned that while Delicatessen has some of the affecting whimsy of that earlier film, it also revels in the grotesque to a sometimes queasy extent. It's a post-apocalyptic tale about a decaying apartment house in a bombed-out city, in which the ground floor is occupied by the titular establishment, run by a butcher who carves up the occasional employee (lured there by a Help Wanted ad) and serves him to his tenants. The grotesquerie of Delicatessen has caused it to be likened to the works of Terry Gilliam (who endorsed its American release) and David Lynch, but it's somewhat more anarchic than their films, borrowing its tropes equally as much from horror movies. It has its moments, but I found my interest flagging as its eccentricities piled up.
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