Delicatessen

Delicatessen, the first feature film by the now legendary and ephemeral duo of Caro and Jeunet, was certainly an event, but also a shock at a time when French cinema still saw itself as nothing more than a photograph of reality. With their absurd humour, jumbled imagination and aesthetic ambitions, the two artists were making a mark on the landscape. (...) The terrible story of a building in wartime, its inhabitants fed by an (opportunistically) cannibalistic butcher, a dark comedy in a retro-futurist world inhabited underground by cave-dwelling robbers, arriving like an elegant pachyderm in the china shop of French cinema. Even if Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix have already opened a few doors, this cinema, which combines old-style French fantasy, the evocative aesthetics of the great cinema of the past (Marcel Carné in particular), the punkish delirium of Métal Hurlant comics, a timeless cobbled-together Terry Gilliam-like style (Brazil), and an ultra-contemporary technical precision, is absolutely unique, not to say revolutionary. A film that was certainly conceived as a form of liberation, in which Caro and Jeunet constantly multiply their ideas and aspirations, moving from small, vaguely worrying sequences (the very caustic opening) to sketch-like sequences in which the terrible darkness of the universe (we are probably talking about post-apocalyptic France here) is constantly counterbalanced by crazy characters, full of obsessions, tics, villainy and coquetry (...). (Nathanaël Bouton-Drouard; regard-critique.fr)�