Delicatessen dvd movie.|
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List Price: $29.99 Our Price: $20.49 You Save: $9.5 Features • Color • DVD-Video • Subtitled • NTSC In Theaters : 03 April, 1992 DVD Release : 02 May, 2006 |
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Delicatessen description The title credit for Delicatessen reads "Presented by Terry Gilliam," and it's easy to understand why the director of Brazil was so supportive of this outrageously black French comedy from 1991. Like Gilliam, French codirectors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro have wildly inventive imaginations that gravitate to the darker absurdities of human behavior, and their visual extravagance is matched by impressive technical skill. Here, making their feature debut, Jeunet and Caro present a postapocalyptic scenario set entirely in a dank and gloomy building where the landlord operates a delicatessen on the ground floor. But this is an altogether meatless world, so the butcher-landlord keeps his customers happy by chopping unsuspecting victims into cutlets, and he's sharpening his knife for a new tenant (French comic actor Dominque Pinon) who's got the hots for the butcher's nearsighted daughter! Delicatessen is a feast (if you will) of hilarious vignettes, slapstick gags, and sweetly eccentric characters, including a man in a swampy room full of frogs, a woman doggedly determined to commit suicide (she never gets its right), and a pair of brothers who make toy sound boxes that "moo" like cows. It doesn't amount to much as a story, but that hardly matters; this is the kind of comedy that springs from a unique wellspring of imagination and inspiration, and it's handled with such visual virtuosity that you can't help but be mesmerized. There's some priceless comedy happening here, some of which is so inventive that you may feel the urge to stand up and cheer. --Jeff Shannon |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | "No-one is entirely evil. It's the circumstances. Or we don't know what we're doing." |
| Set in a rotting wasteland where food and barter replace money, Dominque Pinon's unemployed clown (a gentle-natured cross between Popeye and Klaus Kinski) takes a job as handyman-cum-dinner in a rundown apartment owned by a butcher who hacks up the hired help to feed his other, not too morally particular residents. Complications ensue when he falls in love with the butcher's daughter and she enlists the aid of an underground group of vegetarian terrorists to help her save him. The butcher himself is beginning to feel remorse ("No-one is entirely evil. It's the circumstances, or we don't know what we're doing") but that doesn't stop him trying to make mincemeat out of his prospective son-in-law. There's more, but you probably won't believe me.
What starts out as just your average cannibalism comedy gradually wins you over, drawing you into the damaged lives of the block's credibly eccentric inhabitants, and even comes up with an entirely new way to get out of a trapped bathroom, but not one I'd recommend trying at home (unless you're being pursued by a cannibalistic butcher, of course). Nice little touches abound, such as the butcher's clumsy short-sighted daughter buying two of everything in case she breaks them or the granny who has tin cans tied to her so that her family can find her if she gets lost (no prizes for guessing what happens to her). You may not think you'll like it, but you probably will in spite of yourself... The muted sepia tones are well captured, and there's an excellent extras package as well, including a genuinely informative audio commentary by Jean-Pierre Jeunet on a disc well worth buying - if it's to your taste. |
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