Delicatessen

I had previously seen many of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films; Amelie is a favorite of mine as is City of Lost Children. I've been aware of Delicatessen for a long time so I took the opportunity to watch this film.

The film throws its character into a dystopic setting in a fictional and ambiguous time period presumably in France. The tenants of the ramshackled apartment building that dominates the staging of the film are in cahoots with the butcher in a scheme to lure in unsuspecting victims looking for work to eventually murder and eat them. In the sewers dwell a group of radical "seedsuckers" repulsed by the butcher's activity and eventually are intertwined in a plot to stop the tenants from eating the unsuspecting protagonist and pillage the butcher's hoard of corn.

This disparity serves as commentary and a humorous polarization of human survival instincts in a post-consumerist enabling society. The butcher is feared, psychotic, and hoards this world's currency (food, seeds) as the tenants become dependent on his murderous scheme for meat. The "society" that is constructed within the apartment's walls are cannibalistic and prey on the unsuspecting while shunning the more sustainable lifestyle of the seedsuckers whom they despise.