MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Delicatessen’: Tasteless but Filling Morsel

“Delicatessen� (Fine Arts) is a nightmare comedy with a childlike center of gravity. Set in a truly bleak future--a post-Apocalypse French city where meat-eaters prey on each other and vegetarians are underground insurgents hiding out in the sewers--it adopts a bizarre, playful tone. The macabre imagery and horrific shocks and jolts--the decaying hotel rooms and acts of insane violence--are recorded with a wistful, wackily innocent eye.

Created by two young French filmmakers--Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro--�Delicatessen� is a fearsomely intense movie that mixes moods with formidable assurance. A Grand Prize winner at the Chicago Film Festival, it’s loaded with horrific images and macabre jolts that keep resonating eerily in your mind’s eye.

An old man lives in a flooded room with frogs and a vast heap of discarded snail shells. A determined but inept suicide tries to hang, poison, shoot and gas herself simultaneously. Meanwhile, an evil apelike butcher (Jean Claude Dreyfus) prowls the shadowy corridors of a deteriorating hotel, cleaver poised, hunting meat.

Appropriately, the movie’s heroine and hero are the butcher’s myopic cello-playing daughter and a small, sweet-tempered clown, lured in by a phony ad. The clown, Louison, is played by Dominique Pinon, the memorably menacing shaven-headed punk of “Diva.� Here, he’s not menacing at all; wisps of golden light illumine him like a cracked cherub.

Jeunet and Caro have some obvious influences--Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,� Tex Avery’s more surreal and violent cartoons--and the movie also suggests Polanski and the Coen brothers. But it’s an original: It is like a nightmare. Jeunet and Caro don’t rely on dialogue: The speeches here are written by their collaborator, French comic-book artist Gilles Adrien, and the whole movie has been conceived in grandiose, garishly witty comic-book images: tilted, skewed angles, grotesque perspectives. At one point, Louison hangs on a toilet over an abyss. At another, heroine Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) keeps waking, screaming, out of one bad dream, into another.

This is a world where everything is falling apart, where entropy rules, where people have begun to eat each other. “Delicatessen� processes a lot of American movies and pop culture--mostly horror movies--but the movie’s look also suggests Eastern European films, while the sensibility is distinctly French.

“Delicatessen� suggests the end of culture and human ties, the triumph of appetite. In strategy, the movie resembles Woody Allen’s underrated “Shadows and Fog,� another horror comedy with a sweet center. But it connects with its audience in a bloodier, gutsier way.

Jeunet and Caro split up their filmmaking chores--Jeunet directs the actors, Caro is more responsible for design and effects--and perhaps that’s why there’s such a satisfying density to “Delicatessen.� The film itself is playful, weird, unpredictable and a bit tasteless. It has all the prerequisites of a true cult movie, which, in France, it already is. This is one foreign film that probably won’t languish in the usual art-house ghetto; “Delicatessen� (Times-rated: Mature, for sensuality and violence) outshocks and outplays the American horror comedies at their own game. It’s a feast of fools, a banquet of frissons : a nasty, childlike, murderously funny show.

‘Delicatessen’

Dominique Pinon: Louison

Marie-Laure Dougnac: Julie Clapet

Karin Viard: Miss Plusse

Jean Claude Dreyfus: Le Boucher

A Miramax Films presentation. Directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro. Producer Claude Ossard. Screenplay by Gilles Adrien, Jeunet, Caro. Cinematographer Darius Khondji. Editor Herve Schneid. Costumes Valerie Pozzo Di Borgo. Music Carlos D’Alessio. Production design Jean-Philippe Carp, Kreka Kjnakovic. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (sexual situations, macabre violence).