Butcher-landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has a unique way of taking care of his tenant-customers in DELICATESSEN
CINÉSALON: DELICATESSEN (Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 10, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org
Following a rather rough 2016, the world doesn’t seem to be as funny as it once was. FIAF is trying to do something about it with its first CinéSalon series of 2017, “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” Running on Tuesday nights through February 21 — without a hint of Jerry Lewis in sight — the festival kicks off January 10 with Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s delicious debut, Delicatessen. In a bizarre, postapocalyptic future, one apartment complex is surviving via its ground-floor butcher shop, where landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) carefully wields his giant cleaver, hiring desperate, lonely men to do odd jobs for him before carving them up and selling their flesh and bones to his hungry customers. His latest potential victim is Louison (Dominique Pinon), a mild-mannered clown struggling to get by. But when Clapet’s shy daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), takes a liking to Louison, the butcher has to decide whether someone else should be their next meal. Meanwhile, Aurore Interligator (Silvie Laguna) keeps devising Rube Goldberg-esque ways to kill herself, Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) tries to prevent Clapet from making mincemeat of his mother-in-law (Edith Kerr), Frog Man (Howard Vernon) has come up with his own curious menu, Clapet gives special treatment to sexpot Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard), and an underground group of Troglodistes are preparing for revolution.
Louison (Dominique Pinon) clowns around in Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Genet’s brilliant audiovisual feast
Inspired by the work of Terry Gilliam, Delicatessen is a brilliant audiovisual feast, with every sound and image orchestrated for maximum absurdity, courtesy of cinematographer Darius Khondji (Seven, Stealing Beauty), longtime Marguerite Duras composer Carlos d’Alessio (India Song, The Children), and art director Miljen Kreka Klakovic (The Pillars of the Earth, The Order). Caro also did the gorgeous production design and makes a cameo as Fox. Several scenes turn into wildly inventive, hysterical musical numbers with a vaudevillian sensibility. Winner of four César Awards, the film is wickedly funny, taking place in a grim, fantastical, surreal vision of the future that is part Road Warrior, part Brazil, part Monty Python, where even methods of surveillance are downright strange. The cast is appropriately weird, none more so than Caro and Jeunet regular Pinon and his familiar, oddball face. The directors went on to collaborate on the stunning sci-fi gem The City of Lost Children before going their separate ways, Jeunet making such films as Alien: Resurrection, A Very Long Engagment, and Amélie and Caro writing and directing Dante 01. A twenty-fifth anniversary digital restoration of Delicatessen is screening January 10 at 4:00 and 7:30; “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” continues through February 21 with such other French laugh fests as Mohamed Hamidi’s One Man and His Cow, Jean-Christophe Meurisses’s Apnée, Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, and Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, with each show followed by a reception and the 7:30 show introduced by a special guest.