Subject: REVIEW: DELICATESSEN

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1992 14:24:48 GMT

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                                DELICATESSEN
                      A film review by Mark R. Leeper
			Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper

          Capsule review:  Weird and morbid comedy about life in
     some strange post-Holocaust future.  Cannibals and
     vegetarians battle in a world where the only meat available
     is from other people.  Meanwhile, life goes on in a strange
     apartment house over a delicatessen.  Offbeat is putting it
     mildly.  Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4).

     The time is the future, perhaps ten years after it all went bad.  The
sky is thick yellow fog.  Humans have two legs and frogs have four, but the
only other animals left alive have six or eight.  Legal tender is bags of
lentils or corn.  And something else has disappeared with the world we knew.
What is missing is something like sanity.  With so few animals around,
society has been broken into two classes, vegetarians and those who have
taken to heart the adage that one man's meat is another man's person, so to
speak.  The setting is an apartment house standing over one of the few
remaining delicatessens.  And only rarely does the delicatessen have meat.
In the apartment there are the long-term residents and the transients.  The
transients do not so much move out as disappear.  And as their luck would
have it, they always disappear just in time to miss one of the meat days at
the delicatessen.

     In the apartment building live a typical bunch of people.  There is the
supremely myopic cello player who has nearly given up on finding a husband.
There are two men who make those toy cylinders that when turned upside down
moo like a cow used to.  Then there is the nice woman who hears voices
telling her to commit suicide.  She tries to oblige in complex and creative
ways.  Fortunately or not, her Rube-Goldberg-like suicide mechanisms just
don't work.  Into this old neighborhood moves an ex-circus clown ear-marked
to be literally dead meat.  Somehow he evades the butcher's knife and falls
for the nearly blind cello player.

     With many a supremely gruesome twist and turn, this film is a logical
descendent of the British film THE BED-SITTING ROOM and the French LE
DERNIER COMBAT--two very strange slice-of-post-holocaust-life black
comedies.  And it perhaps is the most entertaining of the three.  Some of
its visual style is also reminiscent of BRAZIL.  the style is mostly short
gag scenes that eventually add up to a plot which in the final third is
somewhere between madcap and frenetic.  This is a film for particularly
morbid tastes in comedy.  I give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.

					Mark R. Leeper
					att!mtgzy!leeper
					[email-masked]