Tag Archives: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Saturday Matinee: Delicatessen

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Les temps difficiles

By Tim Brayton

Source: Alternate Ending

There is a minor contradiction secreted away in the production history of Delicatessen. The 1991 film exists mostly so that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro could prove they had what it took to write and direct a feature, and thereby secure financing for the screenplay they really wanted to make, The City of Lost Children. And that’s exactly what they did, using Delicatessen‘s impressive critical, commercial, and awards success to leap into making the far more ambitious, higher-budget movie, with Jeunet continuing on as a solo director to keep it up, sometimes having more resources and sometimes fewer, but never having to return to such a low-scale production as his feature debut. And yet for all this, I’m not sure that any of the films that Delicatessen‘s success enabled are actually as wholly satisfying on their own terms. It really is the perfect version of itself, barring a few errant shots or cuts here and there. Nor I do not think that the lack of resources is entirely coincidental. There are the films like Amélie that get made when a filmmaker has the ability to run wild and indulge himself, and while that can be exhilarating, just as easily it can be exhausting and annoyingly solipsistic. Delicatessen is a perfect demonstration of the idea that great art needs some constraints: everything Jeunet and Caro did in the film, they did deliberately and with focused intent, and the resultant film is just way the hell tighter than anything else the filmmaking team, or Jeunet solus, have ever put their names to.

Generally speaking, Delicatessen is described as “post-apocalyptic”, which I think is a little too cut-and-dry. From a production design standpoint – and everything in the film, up to and especially including the acting, needs to be understood from a production design standpoint (which was, for the record, provided by Caro himself) – the world presented in the film is a polyglot of elements from mid-20th Century France and America, with most of the props having the vague sense of ’60s home goods invested with untold years of decay and corruption (this is a perfect example of the “restraints create art” ethos: many of the objects seen in the film were scavenged on account of the small art direction budget). The sense that results isn’t that we’re watching some hideous future, but rather a nightmarish alternate version of the recent past, where everything went terribly wrong. More than anything, Delicatessen feels like it takes place just across the Channel from the bureaucratic hellhole England of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil a 1985 release set pointedly “somewhere in the 20th Century”.

Which makes sense, given that Gilliam’s work was a state influence on Jeunet and Caro, and Brazil looms particularly large over their body of work: beyond Delicatessen, both The City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection (Jeunet’s third feature, and first without Caro co-directing) are fairly obvious in their borrowings from Brazil, though neither goes so far with it. Delicatessen doesn’t just share aspects of its design mentality with Gilliam’s film, it shares a very distinctive strategy for cinematography, with wide-angle lenses creating a sense of bug-eyed closeness that manages to avoid the edge distortion typical of wide angles, while exploiting their tendency to make objects in the center of the frame uncannily, uncomfortably present. It’s one of the two most obvious ways that the film visually puts across a feeling of thoroughly unnerving otherness, the other being its tightly constrained color palette – this is an outstandingly yellow movie, introducing its central location emerging from a thick yellow fog like the ruins of a medieval abbey, and never letting us forget about it through all of the shots of locations that appear to be permanently stained in ochre soot. It’s overwhelming and also subtle, but also cunning in its way: the payoff to all that yellow is the film’s solitary use of blue (yellow’s opposite in the RGB color system) is all the way in its final scene, when it is specifically used to counterbalance the diseased feeling of the whole movie up to that point. Among the film’s other points of interest, Delicatessen was the first film of major lasting significance shot by Darius Khondji, and it’s very much in line with his later triumphs: tightly constrained in color, marked with a certain filthy texture to the stock, and instantly effective at creating a very specific atmosphere.

So anyway, all of that visual presence is in service to something, after all, and here’s what that is: wherever and whenever we are, there is a solitary building on the outskirts of what used to be civilsation. On the bottom floor of this building is a delicatessen, run by by a rubbery, fat butcher named Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus); he’s also the landlord for the apartments which occupy all of the upper levels, all of them populated by a visually grotesque menagerie of idiosyncratic characters: such as Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) and his wife (Anne-Marie Pisani), grubby impoverish sorts; the Interligators, Aurore (Silvie Laguna) and Georges (Jean-François Perrier), she dressed like a ’50s schoolchild’s idea of a society lady and plagued by a voice that only she hears, urging her to commit suicide; the nameless man (Howard Vernon) who lives in a watery dungeon full of snails and frogs, looking a bit slimy and frog-eyed himself; and Clapet’s own estranged daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), a birdlike young woman with a thin face and sharp eyes. We learn pretty damn quickly that this building houses some kind of horrible secret, given that the opening scene features Clapet laughing broadly as he plunges a cleaver into the skull of a terrified man (Pascal Benezech) hiding in a garbage can; it’s no real surprise that the denizens of the building are all in on a conspiracy to entice drifters with the promise of a job, and then murder them for their meat, distributed evenly among all residents. It’s all part of the world of absolute social collapse and near-total privation that the film sketches out; cannibalism, it’s implied, is the only way to get any meat in this place.

The plot, such as it is, begins when ex-clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) takes up Clapet’s job posting, and turns out to be a skilled enough hand that the butcher is reluctant to kill him right away. Worse still, Julie takes pity on Louison, and starts feeding him a powerful soporific tea to keep him asleep and safely in bed at the times that Clapet waits in the stairwell to kill whoever ends up crossing his path. Naturally enough, Julie and Louison fall in love, because as you can no doubt tell from everything I’ve written so far, Delicatessen is first and foremost a romantic comedy. That’s not me being even a tiny bit sarcastic: after the florid design of the thing, which I broadly use to include the peculiar timbre of the cinematography and the physical distortions of the actors, the most notable thing about Delicatessen is its indefinite use of genre. I could not, if you forced me to, state with absolute confidence if this is mostly a horror film that happens to be so quirky and funny that it’s not even a tiny bit scary, or if it’s mostly a comedy that invests so much in violent death and a despairing culture in the midst of collapse that it becomes horrifying. What I can do is to approvingly note of the fact that as it moves towards the end, it abandons either to become a live-action Tex Avery cartoon: the nerve-wracking physical anarchy and use of slapstick as a murder weapon is entirely in the spirit of a Screwy Squirrel short, and the film even gets away with the old “bathroom fills up with water until somebody opens the door” bit at the end, having spent most of its 99 minutes building exactly the kind of demented anything-goes universe where that feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to occur, in between the attack by separatist vegetarians who live in the sewers and the Rube Goldberg suicide machines.

Whatever mode it’s occupying, what dominates Delicatessen is shocking: this is as dewy-eyed and sweet in its outlook as anything in Amélie. Even while indicting them all as willing cannibals, Jeunet and Caro and co-writer Gilles Adrien portray the residents of the apartment with an essential affection and whimsy, using a playful sequence early on (the residents all creating musical interludes to the accompaniment of Clapet having sex with a certain Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) on squeaky bedsprings) to set up the idea that the apartment is a living organism, an ecosystem in which every emotionally aberrant figure within has their key and necessary role in the proper functioning of the whole. Given how frankly evil they are, and how joyfully the starts knocking them off, it’s a bit surprising and pleasant how much Delicatessen openly loves its cast.

Most of all it loves Louison and Julie, who are the aspect of this film that looks forward the most clearly to Jeunet’s solo projects: childlike innocents playing at a beatified, sexless version of romance, set against things like the circus and tea sets to accentuate just how much they’re too lighthearted for this corrosive place and this corrosive world. It is a bent, weird, ugly, and menacing film in so many ways, but it is entirely driven by the sweet charms of its central pair; in turn, the saccharine sentimentality of that plot (that thing which ruined Amélie for those – I am not one, by any stretch – who consider it to be ruined) is counterbalanced by the savage nastiness of the setting and plot. It’s a perfect balance, and while there’s the odd moment here or there where the directors fluff the timing of scenes or repeat concepts once too often, Delicatessen is something close to a miracle of style and tone and narrative all slashing at each other from odd angles to produce a flawlessly unified whole. Lord knows that this isn’t for everybody, but if we take the idea of a romantic comedy set in the ruins of a dead society and dressed up with cannibal horror seriously at all, it’s hard to see how it could turn out better than this.

Watch Delicatessen on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/308310/delicatessen

Saturday Matinee: The City of Lost Children

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By Bill Gibron

Source: Pop Matters

Film has always been a visual medium. In the days before sound, the image was all we had. It told our story, established our characters, and accentuated the drama or comedy. Visual flair is as old as movies themselves, and yet so few directors today seem to rely on and relish in the imaginative or outrageous. Since the early ’60s, Hollywood and its filmmakers have de-evolved style in a vicious cycle real world recreation for the hyper-stylized universe of the big screen, exploiting small events to find the hidden theatrics. Instead of broad canvases of color or rich, dense imagery, we witness the mundane or maudlin. Even those epic dreamscapes woven by complex computers and deranged art designers usually have one foot firmly planted in the easy to recognize and rationalize. But not The City of Lost Children. It harkens back to a more old-fashioned pictographic mindset. In many significant and indirect ways, the wild world of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet is art come to life. As in their previous film together, 1991’s Delicatessen, it is a fairy tale presentation of pure unbridled, wonderfully wicked imagination. It’s the Brothers Grimm as envisioned by Salvador Dali and filmed by Fritz Lang.

This is a lost classic, a film not often discussed when visionary works of imaginative cinema are mentioned. Part of this may be due to its foreign film roots. Or perhaps, for many, the film is too dark, not your typical sweet Saturday morning matinee. There are very disturbing subtexts to City that do not exist in other flights of fancy. The children here are indeed lost, either captured and tormented by a character known as Krank, or forced into a life of juvenile crime by the manipulative twins who run an orphanage. We do not see mothers or fathers. There are no caregivers or guardians, nor do we see orphans or outcasts longing for them. This lack of unconditional love creates youths who are vastly more mature, discussing subjects like love and fear with ferocious intensity and sly maturity. The strongman known as One is the closest we have to any type of parental figure, and even he is not really the older, bigger brother. “No parents” does not equal “no worries” in City. This is also a film that wallows in the subtle beauty of the grotesque, amplifying ugliness to illustrate unbridled absurdity. From Jean Paul Gautier’s Marquis de Sade meets Moby Dick fashion statements to the walleyed, demon-like faces of the child-napping zealot Cyclops, the film takes the long lost look of the circus sideshow and melds it to a nightmarish world of technological and emotional freaks.

Jean-Pierre and Marc are obviously obsessed with the carnival. The entire color scheme seems lifted from a tattooed man’s body illustrations. Like Fellini’s La Strada, which sought to tell a simple tale of love and the human spirit within the unreal realm of the circus, the filmmakers use the fantastical festival setting as a means of expressing their themes. Within its pandemonium pallet are the purity of youth, the pain of age, the wickedness of greed, and the comfort of love. There are also religious philosophies at play, battles with God both figuratively and literally. Krank and his army of clones fight and argue amongst themselves, all in the hope that, one day, the Creator will return to right his genetic missteps. The twins lord over their orphan charges like devils at the seat of Satan’s cloven hoof, waiting for instruction and brimstone beatitudes. Even the Cyclops proclaim their undying faith by blinding themselves, hoping that God will see that through both their devotion and their evangelism how truly gifted with sight (both internal and external) they are. Just like the wistful notion of running off to join the traveling show, The City of Lost Children is a chance not taken, a place where the oppression of maturity, of the stark reality of mortality and responsibility turn adults into monsters, and children into commodities.

The viewer can see many divergent ideals and inspirations at work here. But the most interesting influence to wind its way throughout the entire film is American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg. Goldberg’s ingenious drawings illustrated incredibly complicated and multi-stepped procedures to achieve the most basic of results. Several set pieces in the film apply his principles and influences, and there is a giddy joy when their cause and effect logic draws to its ultimate conclusion. One sequence, involving the animal kingdom and a call to arms, is as beautiful as it is ridiculously complex. Like all other special, unnerving aspects of this movie, from the twisted fable at the core of its narrative, to the subtle pronouncements on love and family, The City of Lost Children is indeed like one of Goldberg’s wildest inventions. It’s a film that hitches its humor to the stinger of a flea, rides it on the heads of circus strongmen, and brings its heartfelt conclusion to rest in the bubbling tank of a talking, sarcastic brain. Yet the movie never gets lost itself. There is a perverse logic in its over symbolic and stylized storytelling.

No discussion of City would be complete without a word or two about the film’s music and its wonderful performances. As he has done in so many other films for auteurs like David Lynch and Paul Schrader, Angelo Badalamenti creates the perfect score, adding the clarion call of the calliope and the lonesome moan of the strings to underscore the strangeness and the sadness. This is a town under fire from within (the gangs of mercenary urchins) and without (the abductions), and Badalamenti creates a theme and an aural presence for every ideal. Sonically, The City of Lost Children is a near seamless matching of music to moving image. As for the actors, Ron Perlman has always seemed like a stunt waiting to be cast. Usually unrecognizable in face altering or obliterating make-up, he normally essays roles as unreal as the location in this film. But interestingly enough, he is the very human core of the film, a strong, faithful muscleman whose basic needs match his simpleton intellect. His is a perfectly modulated, understated performance. Among the child actors, little Judith Vittet stands out as Miette, a child who carries an incredible amount of adult soul and beauty within her delicate, French bisque features. And as usual, Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon applies his elastic facial features to the creation of six distinct characters, all out of minimal dialogue and elegant pantomime.

A movie like The City of Lost Children doesn’t really want to show us where the secrets of youth are hidden. It buries its message of adulthood and its perils in elaborate sets and visually arresting images. It symbolizes the dead end of avarice, the importance of familial bonds, and the painful loss of innocence through dreams in wonderful, paint box strokes. But it still leaves us wondering if such a place actually exists. For some, the manufactured wonders of Disney World or Universal Studios theme parks offer a glimpse into the sacred village of eternal childhood. Still others find it in the magic of their offspring at play, in their riotous laughter. Many see it in the eyes of their son or daughter as they light up in loving response. And there are those who, no matter how hard they try or how long they look, will never find the City. It will pass them by, or they will look over or through it in pursuit of a more complicated, unimportant goal. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro have at least provided a roadmap to the mythological place in their film La Cité des Enfants Perdus. Just turn right at your dreams, be on the lookout for your heartstrings, and ride your imagination all the way to where the sea meets the sky.

https://vimeo.com/75469682