Thirty-two years ago today, the film Delicatessen premiered. I cannot believe it was 30 years ago. Like with a lot of movies in the early and mid 1990s, I saw this movie in the theater alone. I would look up movie reviews in The Stranger newspaper and figure out when I could go see them. I remember thinking that I had stumbled on something really special. It is available streaming now. I just wish you could sneak off to a matinee at an old little theater at the North end of Broadway in Seattle’s Capital Hill neighborhood. I wish you would walk out of that theater onto the rainy sidewalk and feel that you are carrying with you a little gift.
Title: Delicatessen
Directed by: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Produced by: Claudie Ossard
Written by: Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring: Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Rufus, Ticky, Holgado, Sylvie Laguna, Jacques Mathou, Jean-Francois Perrier, Anne-Marie Pisani, Howard Vernon, Chick Ortega
Music by: Carlos d’Alessio
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Edited by: Hervé Schneid
Production Companies: UGC, Hachette Première, Constellation, Victoires Productions
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: April 17, 1991 (France)
Running time 99 minutes
Country: France
Language: French
Budget: $3.8 million
Box office: $12.4 million
In a dilapidated apartment building in a post-apocalyptic France, food is in short supply and grain is used as currency. On the ground floor is a butcher’s shop, run by the landlord, Clapet, who posts job opportunities in the Hard Times paper as means to lure victims to the building, whom he murders and butchers as a cheap source of meat to sell to his tenants.
Following the murder of the last worker, unemployed circus clown Louison applies for the vacant position. During his routine maintenance, he befriends Clapet’s daughter, Julie, a relationship which slowly blossoms into romance. Louison proves to be a superb worker with a spectacular trick knife and the butcher is reluctant to kill him too quickly. During this time several of the tenants fall under Louison’s boyish charms, worrying others who are more anxious for their own safety should they require meat. Aware of her father’s motives, Julie descends into the sewers to make contact with the feared Troglodistes, a group of vegetarian rebels, whom she persuades to help rescue Louison.
During the apparent butchering of an old woman, the Troglodistes attack but are repelled, and Clapet, with the unsympathetic tenants, storms Louison’s room in an attempt to murder him. Louison and Julie resist by flooding themselves, floor to ceiling, in an upper floor bathroom until Clapet opens the door, releasing the flood and washing the attackers away. Clapet returns with Louison’s knife and inadvertently kills himself. Louison and Julie play music together on the roof of the now peaceful apartment building.
Waldina 