REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

By: Tom Nealon
May 31, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

DELICATESSEN | JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET and MARC CARO | 1991

What grabs you and shakes you about Delicatessen, once the cannibalism, the slapstick, the apocalypse, and the romance have drifted past, is how the only thing keeping the tenants of the apartment building above the delicatessen living in terror of being the next day’s special is their desire to eat meat. The basement piles up with the excess grain traded with Clapet the butcher for bits of meat farmed from neighbors and handy-men. It’s easy to lose sight of this — because the movie immediately starts in with the peril, the tenants trapped in their apartments at night, fearing to go out lest they end up wrapped up in brown paper and twine. We forget that their own hunger is to blame.

The movie is surreal enough to resist easy interpretations. Is it about the holocaust, capitalism, our addiction to things that spell our doom (meat, oil, comfort)? Sure. Ex-clown Louison shows up and bridges the dichotomy between the apartment-dwellers trapped by their resistance to a vegetarian diet and the vegetable-loving troglodytes waging a weirdo war against the surface-dwellers. In fact, he floats above the dichotomy and blithely reveals how the apartment-dwellers aren’t just sweating out the apocalypse in a cursed building with a homicidal landlord, but are implicated in what’s going on. When Clapet’s daughter falls for Louison and his end-times Buster Keaton act, the apartment-dwellers join Clapet in hunting him down, turning from fearful neighbors into a ravening mob.

Louison’s aversion to meat, we’ve learned, was well-earned. (He was briefly famous for his act with a chimp, Livingston, who ended up being eaten.) He shows up at Clapet’s door for a job, not a meal; he’s there to replace the last dinner, er, diner, repairman. He has been out in the world, has survived the worst it has thrown at him — the death of his partner and livelihood. Yet he is unbroken, and has chosen not just to eschew eating his neighbors, but to eat no meat at all. He is not trapped at the delicatessen; he chooses to be there.

A movie remarkable for its mixture of economy of setting and variety of tone, Delicatessen is also remarkable in its treatment of cannibalism. While it is a metaphor used to good and horrific effect, cannibalism also manages to be banal here, a background element — always lurking but never taking over the story. This never happens! Silence of the Lambs, Sweeney Todd, Raw, Eating Raoul; it is hard to think of a movie for which cannibalism is a major plot point where you don’t associate the movie entirely with cannibalism. Here, though cannibalism skulks around, one instead associates the movie with the choices it suggests we’re always making… between light and dark, trapped and free, implicated and innocent, hungry and… peckish.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)

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