Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is a butcher who runs the generically named "Delicatessen" housed in a bombed-out looking apartment building filled to the brim with eccentrics. Since food is scarce in the film's world, Clapet has devised a scheme to provide himself and his tenants with a regular supply of meat--he runs ads in the local paper for handymen, and after they fix a few things on the building, they become the main course. When the film begins, we see a man who tries unsuccessfully to escape. The bulk of the film is the story of Stan Luison (Dominique Pinon), who is the latest person to answer Clapet's advertisement.<br /><br />This film is definitely an acquired taste, so to speak. I've acquired the taste, and for me, it's a 10 out of 10. Delicatessen is set in a weird, post-apocalyptic, alternate universe that is not entirely dissimilar to the setting of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985)--in fact, this could very easily be the same world as Brazil, just that that film is situated in its titular locale, and this would be a less fashionable section of France. Like Brazil, most of the production design--the costumes, music, television programming, etc.--suggests an historic setting, say about the 1940s, but it also seems to be set in the future, or at least an alternate present.<br /><br />In place of Brazil's elaborate, chaotic technology, directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet have created a multi-leveled Rube Goldberg construction. Goldberg was an American cartoonist and sculptor known for drawings of incredibly complex contraptions that often performed simple tasks. This recurs from small scales--the interconnected tubes in the building and the uses of the "Australian", to medium scalesAurore Interligator's (Silvie Laguna) attempted suicide set-ups, to the grand scale of the film, where each character, or set of characters, is interlocking in different ways that has a small, but complex causal effect on the whole. Sometimes, these concatenations are more simultaneous than causal, as in the ingenious "bedspring symphony" near the beginning of the film.<br /><br />Appropriate to its ultimate subject matter, the visuals are focused on decay and dinginess. The delicatessen is filthy and the apartment building is falling apart. The tenants own a lot of broken things, and for those things that aren't broken, there's a good chance they'll get broken as the film progresses. (And by the way, if you love the production design and atmosphere of the film, and wouldn't mind seeing something with a similar mood, but serious instead of a surrealistic "black comedy" like Delicatessen, check out David Cronenberg's Spider (2002)).<br /><br />All the tenants have various eccentricities, often involving food. One of the most interesting tenants is an old man who decided to harvest his own meals by turning his apartment into a swamp, via regularly running water flooding the apartment, and inhabited by frogs and snails. He has a huge pile of empty snail shells stacking up in a corner. Water is a motif in the film--probably because of its relationship to food, as a means of necessary nourishment, although ironically, in a world characterized by food shortages, water is mostly wasted in the film.<br /><br />While not a depressing film (it wasn't to me, at least, although not that I dislike "depressing" films), Delicatessen isn't exactly uplifting, either, although there is a message of hope at the end, I suppose. It's definitely not for all audiences, but if you're a fan of Gilliam, Cronenberg, David Lynch, and similar directors, you should definitely try a meal at this Delicatessen.