Delicatessen (1991), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Meat Grinder" by Madvillain

       It’s always something of a treat when you see a couple of creative people just click together on a project. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor for example: Great on their own, and absolute dynamite when put together. Or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, although I’d give anybody credit for hanging out with Jerry Lewis for any length of time. People who may not be friends per se, may not even like each other, yet they are not only understand each other but elevate each other to heights they may not have achieved on their own. It’s a fascinating thing to see, and as someone who is often trapped in his own head and unable to get any creative writing done, thoughts racing ahead of my ability to act upon them, it’s something I’d like to experience myself at some point. Of course some of those famous pairs ended up hating each other, but I figure if you go in hating yourself you won’t have anything to worry about.

Those of you who understand where I’m going with this might not agree with the idea that French-born filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro fit this description. They only really worked on three films together after all, one of which was Alien: Resurrection of all things, and Jeunet’s most successful period both critically and commercially didn’t come until afterwards, while Caro’s film career is basically non-existent as far as I can tell. Not much ‘elevating’ going on. Yet City of Lost Children was a big, Ron Pearlman sized treat, and I feel like I’ve name dropped these two enough times over the years that it’s finally time to cover the film that introduced me to these two in the first place. Years before the blog got rolling in those halcyon days when hulu actually had stuff you could watch for free, I stumbled upon a strange little film by the name of Delicatessen, and decided then and there to never shut the hell up about it. And now we’re here.

Released in 1991, co-written by Gilles Adrien, Delicatessen was the feature-length directorial debut of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. France, and possibly the entire world, has been reduced to a blighted, miserable wreck, much like your average town in the Rust Belt. Meat has become scarce, and rather than switching to a vegetable-based diet, the landlord of an apartment building (who happens to be a butcher and the owner of a delicatessen) and his tenants have arrived at the most sensible solution: Lure folks in with the promise of room and board as the maintenance man, murder them in the night and cannibalize their bodies. Such is the fate intended for Stan Louison, ex-circus man, eternal optimist, played by Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, and at his best when pan-fried and served with soup or a fresh garden salad. However poor Louison is not without allies in this den of wolves; Julie, the butcher’s daughter (played by Marie-Laure Dougnac) is determined that this handyman will not suffer the fate of the others before him. He’s gonna get out, and this apartment building is never going to be the same. Partially because of the severe water damage.

Delicatessen was one of those films that, in hindsight, seated as it was in that collection of weird surrealistic fantasy and science fiction films that have since become my wheelhouse. Our tenants are as motley a crew of misfits as you’d ever see, even if they weren’t cannibals . There’s the woman plagued with voices in her head who plots out elaborate suicides, the brothers who make those little cylinders that moo when you flip them, the pistol packing postman, all folk that would seem right at home in your average mental institution. It’s also nice to see the ‘debut’ appearances of several actors that we would later see in City of Lost Children and Amèlie, like Dominique Pinon, Rufus (who played one of the cow box brothers here and Amèlie’s father) and the late Ticky Holgado. Pinon especially, who so projects this aura of the everyman schlub that it allows him to slip from the likable clown Louison here, to the moronic minions in City, to the misogynist loser in Amèlie without ever skipping a beat. 

Despite that, things never quite come together as it feels they should with this movie. There’s the core of good satire there, that in a time of crisis these folk would literally kill friends and family rather than give up the morning sausage, but it never really comes together in a way that’s completely satisfying. The setting feels a bit too self-contained for the world they’ve established, which makes plot points that happen later feel too convenient. Louison never feels like enough of the doe-eyed optimist to counteract the negativity around him, and while things move towards that direction it feels less like his worldview being challenged and more things happening to him. Which is fine if he’s more of a plot device, a catalyst, and Julie was the main character, but it never definitively moves in that direction either? Delicatessen is a movie full of people moving in a straight line it seems like, they're the exact same person when they come out as they were when they went in. Which I guess doesn’t matter if they all died an agonizingly slow death from starvation after all this, but then that’s true of everything.

Thinking about how to wrap things up, and my mind instantly flashed with comparisons to Jabberwocky, Terry Gilliam’s first proper movie outside of the Monty Python umbrella. Ok films, films that have that spark of something unique that make you perk up your ears and take notice, but trip before the finish line. A prelude to something better, in hindsight. So it was with Gilliam, who proved himself a few years later with Time Bandits and so it was Caro and Jeunet, though to this day it unfortunately has been their last. Delicatessen gets the recommendation, and maybe this short, barely coherent ‘review’ will be what you need to get interested in the works of Jeunet, just as this film was all those years ago. Or at least it might slightly tip the search algorithm in his favor, because apparently he’s hard up for movie-making funds at the moment and needs all the help he can get. I dunno, the internet doesn’t make sense.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Amélie (2001), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Les Jours Tristes", by Yann Tiersen

       Destiny. Fate. Kismet. None of these ideas are ones that I ascribe to, personally, but it does seem like returning to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet was an inevitability. After all, with the way I talked up The City of Lost Children last year, and the way I’ve name dropped Jeunet in countless conversations that may or may not be recorded on this blog, and the fact that we’re digging into return guests this year, the stars seemed to align for this exact moment. Because this wasn’t just a chance to fill my quota, you see; it was the perfect opportunity to relieve myself of a movie-sized weight off my back. A film that has lingered in my to-watch queue for years now like a restless ghost, never quite getting its shoe in the door even as other passovers like Trollhunter and Nightcrawler eventually got their golden tickets and their chances to shine. Always a bridesmaid and never a bride as they say, and the fact that this was due to my own inability to commit was an endless source of annoyance. Well no more. Fuck that, we’re covering Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and we’re doing Amelie, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it! So there!

       Smoothest. Paragraph. Ever.

       Released in 2001, four years after his work on the infamous trainwreck known as Alien Resurrection, Amelie is arguably Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s most famous work, which I base off of the fact that it’s the only one of his films that I’ve actually seen people besides me talk about. At the very least it is his most successful film since his debut, Delicatessen, receiving not only the Cèsar (France’s national film award) for Best Film and Best Director but also his only Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film, and pulling in 174 million dollars on a 10 million dollar budget. It is also the first Jeunet film to not feature the talents of fellow Frenchman Marc Caro, the collaboration which produced Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and which was eventually brought to an end by Alien Resurrection (according to wikipedia). Instead we have Monsieur Guillaume Laurant, who co-wrote this film and would later co-write Jeunet’s latest film, 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. It’s not an unnoticeable difference as I’ll touch upon later, and while it is a shame a partnership that created such interesting films fell apart it also happened over two decades ago so it seems silly to be upset about it now. It’s also possible that Amelie wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the Jeunet/Caro dissolution, and as this is a review (more or less) of Amelie I feel a sense of obligation to support its existence so that I can justify writing about it. As I would for any movie that isn’t Dr. Fugazzi. So let’s get to it.

       On September 3rd 1973 in near Montmartre in Paris, Amelie Poulain is born. A neglected child, split between an aloof father and a neurotic mother, is forced to retreat into dreams and fantasies as a series of unfortunate events pushes her through a painfully isolated adolescence. Five years after the death of her mother in a darkly comedic accident, Amelie’s life is not quite as her dreams might have lead her to believe. She has an apartment, a job as a waitress in a bar/cafe known as The Two Windmills, and she has a handful of odd folks that she might call friends, but none of of it can compare to her daydreams. Then again, what life could?

       Then one day, the same day that Princess Diana had her fatal accident in fact, Amelie discovers a box of trinkets in her apartment, hidden by a boy named Dominique Bretodeau over 40 years ago. Amelie, still chomping at the bit for a change of pace, decides to track down the now senior Bretodeau and return the box to him, and when she sees the look of happiness on his face she is filled with an enormous sense of accomplishment and well-being. So much so in fact that she decides she wants to help more people, and so turns her attention to her friends and neighbors, each with their own set of neuroses and problems that she needs to travail. However, when she happens to meet a young, handsome man named Nino, who just so happens to have the same kind of weird hobbies as her, it soon becomes clear that Amelie is going to need some help of her own.

       Amelie sees the return of many familiar faces for Jeunet fans; Dominique Pinon, Rufus, Ticky Holgado, but the obvious stand out performer is newcomer Audrey Tautou in the titular role of Amelie Poulain. Looking at her in 2018, it honestly feels like the she was the blueprint for what would eventually become known as the ‘hipster girl’. Short hair, unflashy fashion sense, interest in weird things, not traditionally ‘sexy’ but attractive in a slightly androgynous David Bowie kind of way, that exudes a kind of mischievous energy and social awkwardness that brings all the introverts to the yard. Give her a latte and a vinyl record and you’ve probably seen about a dozen Amelies around your local college campus. It works though, because Audrey works. The way she looks and moves, the way she smiles, it meshes perfectly with the character, without any need for dialogue (although that area is okay as well). Seeing her on screen you can tell how she managed to pull several Best Actress awards off of her debut film, Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty Institute, and why Jeunet would bring her back for his next film, A Very Long Engagement. When she’s on screen you want to see more of her, and when she’s not you’re waiting for her to come back. That’s what you call stage presence.

       Now because I promised it earlier, the big difference between Amelie and the early Jeunet-Caro films is one of whimsy vs. caprice. All three films carry this feeling of heightened reality, where magic feels like it could exist even if it doesn’t, but if you’ll recall from The City of Lost Children write up I mentioned that it and Delicatessen were intentionally made as tributes to Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam is a capricious director. Yes his films take place in strange magical worlds, but they’re not exactly very nice worlds either. In the first ever Gilliam film we ever covered on this blog for example, Jabberwocky, Michael Palin plays an utter dunce who is constantly abused by the people around him, Time Bandits has a child traveling through time with a band of surly dwarvish thieves (and that ending…), Baron Munchausen is a pompous ass throughout the entire film (although you warm up to him), and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has a murderous child organ thief in a major role. These are not fairy tales that Gilliam is telling us folks, these are bawdy pub stories, full of grimy, bizarre places and the sad and mean people who live in them. That’s the essence of Gilliam’s films, that sudden, blatant intrusion of reality into fantasy, that Jeunet & Caro attempted to replicate in their own films. Quite well, in my opinion, although it’s been a while since I saw Delicatessen.

       Amelie, on the other hand, is whimsical. There’s no grime in this world, just lovely architecture that houses precisely designed rooms, where our quirky protagonist and their eccentric friends have quirky, eccentric fun together. Sure, sometimes bad things happen, but everything is so explosively colorful and hey man life is like that sometimes so whatever. Rather than Terry Gilliam, it would probably be more appropriate to compare it to the works of Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, or Bryan Fuller’s cult comedy series Pushing Up Daisies, which in retrospect apes so much of the Amelie style you’d think it was some kind of weird fanfiction. Pretty people and upbeat gallows humor, you get the idea.

       That’s where the enjoyment of the film is going to hinge for you, I suppose. If the idea of quirky characters being quirky around each other and falling in love sounds like something you’d be into, then this is definitely the movie for you. If not, then it’s two hours of that thing I just said, so be warned. Personally I ended up liking it, despite not generally being a romance movie kind of guy. I found Amelie and the cast likable enough, the writing generally witty, and the romance being at the very least more believable than The Shape of Water. The 2 hour runtime is a bit of an issue, I feel like they drag the build up a bit too long and that the payoff is smaller than it should have been, but overall I think it manages to entertain fairly consistently the whole way through. In spite of its obvious lack of Ron Perlman, that is.

       Well cross Amelie off of the bucket list, finally, and while you’re at it mark it down for a recommendation. It might not be what you might expect from a movie on Halloween, and how many times have I said that on these lists, but it is a fun movie, and potentially capable of filling the cockles of your heart with a warm, fuzzy feeling (as a person without a heart I can only speculate). Grab a bowl of popcorn and a significant other and enjoy. You might not get spooked, but at least you’ll be happy.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - The City of Lost Children (1995), directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Who Will Take My Dreams Away", by Angelo Badalamenti and Marianne Faithfull

     Last year around this same time, the Marathon dipped into the Franc bank to give you two films from the magical land of France: animated bird boob movie Gandahar and one third of the Poe tribute Spirits of the Dead. Pretty okay films all things considered, but the most important thing they did was to get me interested in covering more French films, as long as they were in the appropriates genres. I’d already seen the horror classic Eyes Without A Face, so that was out. La Jetee was also a possibility, having been the inspiration for the amazing 12 Monkeys, but that was another one I’d seen before (plus it’s only 28 minutes long). The work of Luc Besson was probably the strongest contender for the majority of the time, with Nikita, Leon the Professional and The Fifth Element all being on my watch queue at some point or another, however the poor reception to Valerian ended up souring my mood on Besson. Maybe next year.

     Which leads us to The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunut. OG Hellboy Ron Perlman stars as One, a simple-minded yet strong-hearted carnival strongman living in an incredibly 19th century French port city. Live is shit, as you’d expect in a time before labor laws, but it is tolerable as long as he has his ‘little brother’ Denree by his side. Of course Denree is almost immediately kidnapped by bizarre thugs with steampunk technology strapped to their faces, an issue faced by French port cities to this very day. Completely lost as to how to begin his search, One is suddenly joined by Miette, a young street smart orphan girl forced into a life of crime. Together, the odd due go off on a fantastical adventure to rescue Denree, a journey of steampunk cults, evil circus performers, a gaggle of clones and a mad scientist and his devilish dream machine. Not to mention lots and lots of Santa Claus cosplay.

     It makes more sense in context.

     According to the general info, City of Lost Children, along with Delicatessen (which I actually saw years ago) and Amelie (which I constantly see around but never watch) was intended by Caro & Jeunet as a tribute to the works of Thunderbird favorite Terry Gilliam. If you’ve ever seen one of Gilliam’s film, in particular Time Bandits or Brazil, then the comparisons start to flow. Grungy yet colorful and almost expressionistic settings contrasted with fairy tale stylings and magic realism with copious amounts of black and visual humor, occasionally with a Monty Python actor thrown in somewhere. That’s Gilliam, and that’s what Caro & Jeunet manage to accomplish damn well here. The comedy kinda falls flat on occasion, which I’ll chalk up to cultural differences, but it nails that sense of dark fantasy that few directors are able to perfect. Gilliam, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, and now Caro and Jeunet.

     More than anything else though, what really sells the movie is the friendship between One and Miette (played by Judith Villett). The gentle giant and child isn’t a new concept in storytelling (bringing it back to fairy tales), but the two have such a great chemistry that you don’t really mind. Villett as the stoic, wiseass but ultimately vulnerable girl, Perlman saying everything with just an expression, it’s endearing to see them bond over the course of the movie. Way more than any scene with Denree, if we’re being honest. Kid’s a MacGuffin with an eating disorder.

     By the way, the music here is done by Angelo Badalamenti, who you might know from all your favorite David Lynch movies. I actually didn’t know this going into the movie and it ended up being a real treat.

     The hour and 52 minute runtime does drag a bit unfortunately, but overall The City of Lost Children was a lot sillier and lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. More than little bit disturbed, plenty depressing, but at its heart it’s simple moral: If you give love, then you’ll receive love, and no matter how hopeless things seem, love always wins. You don’t often find movies on Halloween that have a happy ending, but this is one that I can heartily recommend. You might even want to throw this on and watch with the kids if the repeats of Nightmare Before Christmas and Monster House has gotten a bit stale. Just remember: Cultural. Differences.