After years of working successfully in commercials and music videos, French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet make a splashing feature-film debut, DELICATESSEN, a hysterical exercise in style. Scripted by comic book writer and frequent Caro and Jeunet collaborator Gilles Adrien, the story follows a sweet-natured clown, Louison (Dominique Pinon), who moves into a run down apartment building with a delicatessen on the ground floor and falls in love with the butcher's daughter, Julie Clapet (Marie-Laure Dougnac). When it turns out that Julie's father (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is actually butchering human beings and selling the meat to the carnivorous tenants of the building, Julie must decide if she will remain loyal to her father's business or expose the truth in order to save Louison from being the next victim. Taking place entirely inside, underneath, and on the roof of the delicatessen, the film uses an old pipe that runs throughout the building as a channel of communication for its characters.

Caro and Jeunet have a flair for visual communication and comedy that overflows in DELICATESSEN, keeping viewers engaged in the film even when the style seems to swallow the plot. In one of the most mimicked scenes of the 1990s (most notably in commercials), the directors brilliantly choreograph a bizarre event in which the separate activities of each of the hotel's tenants--a couple making love in a squeaky bed, a man painting his ceiling, a woman playing the cello--become hilariously rhythmic and synchronised. This scene spawned an entirely new cinematic language, making DELICATESSEN one of the most auspicious directorial debuts of the 1990s.

***

In a post-apocalyptic society where food is so rare it's invaluable and used as currency and people eat each other a young clown applies for a job at a local delicatessen. The butcher's intent is to have him work for a little and then serve him to his stranger than normal tenants who pay him in, of course, grain. This clown falls in love with the butcher's daughter who tries to foil her father's plans by contacting the rebels. The rebels are possibly the most sensible of the lot, as they see food as food and not money.

***

The near future: taking a job and a bedsit at a shabby rooming-house above a butcher's shop, ex-clown Louison (Pinon) falls for the butcher's daughter. But her father, unhappy about the blossoming romance, deals in human flesh: will Louison fall victim, or will the Troglodistes, an underground group of vegetarian fanatics, come to his rescue? On to this slim story, writer-directors Jeunet and Caro pile a wealth of delicious comic detail. Each grotesquely larger-than-life inhabitant of the scrofulous tenement has his own little story; visually, the film evokes Gilliam, Lynch, the Coens and Carné, but the allusions never get in the way of the nightmarish humour. The sets, special effects, photography, pace and performances all contribute to the brash comic-strip vivacity, and even the fairytale romance avoids sentimentality. Increasingly inventive as it progresses, Jeunet and Caro's fast, funny feature debut entertains from sinister start to frantic finish.

Excerpt from TimeOut Film Guide located HERE