The elaborate, carefully planned comedy - even in the opening credits, in which nothing moves - must have been maddeningly difficult to shoot. It's a pity Jeunet and Caro sought to top their efforts when they made "The City of Lost Children" five years later. The result was lifeless and over-elaborate; here, the level of elaboration is just right, with no sequence allowed to be more complicated than it is clever. And even the most gratuitous fantasia - like the montage with the creaking bedsprings, the ceiling repair, the cellist and the metronome, the knitting, the drilling, and the bicycle pump - grows naturally out of the story, like a flower on a vine.<br /><br />But the biggest surprise to someone expecting another "City of Lost Children" is how real the sentiment is. Both films are populated chiefly by grotesques; the difference with the earlier one is that we're allowed to see the human beings underneath, without being invited to laugh ironically. It's worth noting that in the later film all finer human feelings were given to the mentally deficient - a retarded loner, a complete madman, and a child - as if sanity and intelligence precluded the possibility of any other admirable trait. But in "Delicatessen", Louison, however naïve he may be, is no fool; the enchanting Juliet, even as she fumbles her way through a disastrous date because she feel embarrassed wearing glasses, is no object of ridicule. Nobody, in fact, is completely an object of ridicule. Even the butcher is allowed a moment or two when he is neither a joke nor a threat but a human being, one who finds he regrets the life he now leads but is not persuaded to abandon it.<br /><br />Even if "Delicatessen" had been recommended to me I doubt I'd have seen it in its original release. The fact that it was being praised as black comedy would have scared me off. It is indeed black comedy, but I urge you not to be scared: there's nothing nasty about the taste, and the dominant tone is one of optimism. We don't know the nature of the calamity that has struck this world. (It's not, as some people have mistakenly thought, anything so mundane or so easily comprehensible as nuclear war.) We don't know if the plants will ever grow back. But there's so much genuine hope it's hard to believe they won't.