In `Delicatessen,' The Characters Are What They Eat

It all started with French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's wife speculating one day whether the butcher downstairs might be killing and eating the tenants in the building where she and her husband lived.

From such moments, futuristic black comedies are born.

"Delicatessen," now playing at the Varsity, is about an ex-circus clown, Louison (Dominique Pinon), who wanders into an isolated, smog-enfolded Parisian apartment building of the future where the tenants are what they eat - literally. Delicatessen-owner Monsieur Clapet (Jean Claude Dreyfus) is the mastermind behind this, catering to an eccentric gallery of flesh-eaters. His tenant-husbandry works just fine until his daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), falls in love with the new arrival and tries to engineer his escape from her fellow tenants' dinner-plates.

Outrageous in its premise and distinctive in its vision, "Delicatessen" utilizes all the tools of cinema - image, sound, music, production design - to create a zany world of its own. Jeunet and his co-director, Marc Caro, both have a background in animation and experimental video. "Delicatessen," their feature debut and their first experience in working with live actors, has been nominated in 10 categories for the Cesar awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and has proved an unexpected commercial success in France and England, Jeunet said while visiting Seattle last month.

Speaking through a translator, he revealed that he and Caro came up with the film's key images first - a musical clown, a basement full of frogs and snails, a semi-derelict building with an elaborate rooftop - and then wove a story from them. In production, Jeunet concentrated on the actors and camerawork, while Caro created on the film's unique sound, special effects and production design.

While the actors had no problem doing a movie about cannibalism with two directors whose background was in animation ("They were pleased to take part in an original film," Jeunet comments), financial backers were more leery. The movie's opulent look belies the $2 million budget the directors eventually put together. But the actors and crew felt some of the penny-pinching on-set, where cost-control could mean less than ideal conditions.

Among the dangers: working with electrical equipment in a water-logged, frog-and-snail-filled basement, or coping with 25,000 cubic liters of water exploding through a bathroom door.

Pinon gamely submitted to being tied for a week to a toilet-seat suspended in mid-air for a crucial scene. He also used the long pre-production schedule (while financing fell into place) to study circuses, learn clown-routines and master the xylophone and musical saw that his character plays.

Pinon is the film's heart and soul to such a degree that it's tempting to think of him as its central source of inspiration. Other influences, Jeunet says, were television, comic strips and fine art, unconsciously digested, put in a shaker and then poured out. On a more conscious level, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and "Hotel de Nord" by Michel Carne (director of "Children of Paradise") served as imaginative catalysts.

The final product, they hope, is something entirely new, but which at the same time restores standards of filmcraft to the French screen that were jettisoned with the freewheeling novelties of the New Wave cinema of the 1950s and '60s. Jeunet approaches filmmaking as a game where you work with everything - dialogue, sound, imagery, costume - combining traditional expertise with innovative intent.

Despite the film's wry take on meat-eating, the filmmakers' own feeding habits fall short of the mark. Neither of them, Jeunet admits, is vegetarian, although "philosophically" they'd like to be. It's difficult, he says, finding the strength to break away from an omnivore upbringing.

Coming next is "City of Lost Children," a script they collaborated on 10 years ago and are now reworking. Jeunet describes it as a mixture of Pinocchio, Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" and Fritz Lang's "M," and he anticipates that Pinon will have a role in it, "or even several."

Financing is less of a problem for them now, and recent advances in video and film technology will make it easier to bring the film to the screen than when they first envisaged it. Jeunet sees the project as a "spectacular" on an American scale, but with a strong European sensibility behind it.

The one snag, he says, is the success of "Delicatessen." Press-interviews and critical response have caused them to analyze what they're doing, and it's making them self-conscious.

For viewers who like their films straight from the cinemateur's dream-bank, "Delicatessen" is a choice cut indeed. Bon appetit.