‘Eat The Rich’ Was Never As Grotesque As It Was In Delicatessen

Wealth and status are relative. In one corner, you have extreme cases, like Elon Musk; in the other, you’ve got workaday ones, like Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), the landlord of a crumbling tenement building and the antagonist of Jean-Pierre Jeunte’s 1991 dystopian black comedy, Delicatessen. In Delicatessen, which has been given new, grotesque life by Severin Films’ 4K restoration, Clapet may not be rich in a monetary sense, but he’s part of the ruling class in France’s post-apocalypse. Like the property he owns, he’s timeworn, dingy, and lit in hues of bile and bleakness, qualities rarely, if ever, associated with “wealth” — only because “wealth” is usually measured in bank statements.

None of that plays a part in Delicatessen. Instead, the haves and have-nots are identified by food stores; he with the fullest larder has the most power, and those allowed access to said larder have privilege. The world beyond the walls of Clapet’s apartments is desolate, a consequence of a broadly unspecified apocalyptic event that’s rendered the land incapable of sustaining animals or raising enough crops to keep the populace fed. Clapet’s solution to this problem? Tricking hapless bozos into taking custodial work around his building, hacking them up and then expertly dividing their remains into portions of meat, which he sells to residents out of his ground-floor butcher shop. Everyone knows what they’re eating. They just go with it. What choice do they have? This is the world. So it goes.

It’s the meat that makes these people monsters, and the supply of grains and beans that Clapet hoards that makes him rich. When Louison (Dominique Pinon), a beatific circus clown fallen on hard times, arrives at the building looking for a job, the ecosystem of class and cannibalism Clapet oversees is put into peril. Everybody seems to like Louison, which complicates the building’s delicate balance. Clapet murders his workers, the tenants pay him in kernels and seeds for their suppers, everyone stays mum about the carnival of horrors they’re living in, and the cycle repeats. They’re even worse off than Clapet, who has the nicest flat of them all and who has amassed resources they lack.

But the tenants benefit from the gruesome dynamic he’s arranged in the building, which means that by default, they enjoy a higher social status than the unfortunate souls who lack a place to call home, or, in Louison’s case, who show up at the building in hopes of calling it home. Anyone can be powerful. Anyone can revel in the benefits of proximity to power, too. Delicatessen isn’t subtle about the political allegories writers Marc Caro and Gilles Adrian weave into its narrative — it’s a film where the rich literally eat the poor. But Delicatessen recontextualizes “rich” and “poor” in his post-apocalyptic setting; neither word means the same in the movie as what they mean to us in the real world, so Jeunet over-determines his intention as much as possible.

The work, whether in the performances, the dollhouse mise en scène, or the seedy aesthetic, is to make palatable the notion of an entire apartment building’s worth of people becoming willingly complicit in Clapet’s scheme. It’s a Tales From the Crypt set-up: Delicatessen has to persuade the viewer that under the right (or wrong, really) conditions, anybody will turn into a savage to save their own bacon, and also has to connect that to its class motif. Louison is the key. Folks take a liking to the man right away, and how could they not? He’s adorable, he delights them with street magic and bubble tricks, and he fixes that irritating squeak coming from “the second spring on the right” of their mattresses, too. Clapet is loath to turn him into steaks.

But at some point, it’s inevitable that he’ll try to, because Louison is an outsider in the apartment’s social order. It doesn’t matter that he’s useful, Delicatessen argues, he isn’t one of “them” (“them” being the people with power and the people in power). And if you can count on one thing in this world, it’s that when push comes to shove, the powerful will always consume the weak to keep themselves alive. No wonder Delicatessen is such a luridly ugly movie, Jeunet forms it around an ugly truth.

Delicatessen is available to purchase on 4K Blu-ray now.