Delicatessen’s Delightful Dystopia
Set in a surreal, musty-looking street where impoverished citizens must barter and use corn kernels as currency, Delicatessen (1991) offers a unique setting for its characters. While visually post-apocalyptic on the outside, the people living above a delicatessen are engaged in questionable and bizarre but humorous antics.
A butcher named Clapet owns the delicatessen — a deli selling meat — and the apartment above it. As both butcher and landlord, Clapet runs the store and manages his tenants according to his rules. He maintains sole control over sourcing the food and distributing portions of meat to his tenants.
Various characters live in the apartment above the delicatessen: Two men creating hand-made moo boxes; a wealthy man and his timid, yet suicidal and unfaithful wife; a poor man living with two children, a large wife, and his aging mother-in-law; a crazy man whose turned his room into a swamp filled with snails and frogs; the butcher’s voluptuous mistress; and a cellist, and a cellist named Julie, whose also the butcher’s daughter. Occasionally, the mailman stops by to try to woo Julie, but the one successful in winning Julie’s heart is a man new to this town named Louison. Louison is a former circus clown who joins the delicatessen as the apartment maintenance worker to cover for the sudden disappearance of the former employee.
Everyday, the apartment tenants are engaged in their routines that belie the slum conditions that they live in. The clothes they wear, the furniture, and the black-and-white box televisions that they watch all look like they came from the 1950s. In this copper-tone apartment, the artifacts create a cozy steampunk feel. Most of the tenants appear unemployed: The two men who diligently make moo boxes are never shown to be selling them or giving them to anyone, while the delicatessen doesn’t seem to have any customers. Louison is probably the only resident with a real job, apart from his employer, the butcher. As Louison adapts to living in the delicatessen apartment, he too molds in with the humdrum of the tenants and in some scenes, literally moves to the rhythm of the apartment activities.
These activities contrast sharply from the decaying world that the movie has set up. There’s eeriness in the polluted smog surrounding the building and in the yellow-brown camera filter giving everything a rotting, rusting appearance. Clapet, the apartment inhabitants, and the mailman also share an implicit understanding of what the delicatessen truly operates as, unbeknownst to Louison. As time goes by in the film, the butcher continues to sharpen his knife with a menacing grin, the suicide attempts by the rich man’s wife become increasingly complex, and the characters living in privation are getting hungrier. In spite of these unsettling behaviors, the atmosphere feels whimsically ridiculous, and when the characters bounce along to old-timey music to a steam-punk-themed backdrop, they turn Delicatessen into a delightful dark comedy to watch.
