Dean Whitbread 2020
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| I saw the 1991 film Delicatessen again at the weekend. This beautifully shot, charming French film is set in a retro, post-apocalyptic world, with food so scarce that the glowering butcher/landlord regularly hires handymen in order to dispatch and serve them to his tenants.
Underneath the pavements in the dripping sewers, oil-skinned troglodytes lead a subterranean vegetarian resistance existence and eschew the meat-eating cannibalism of the city dwellers above. |
The clown (whose partner the chimp Livingstone has been eaten) becomes the focus for the amorous intentions of the short-sighted butcher’s daughter, and the intricately interwoven plot, with a sub-plot for every tenant, revolves around the flowering of love in this precarious environment.
I love this darkly disturbing, comic film, but the experience of watching it again was very painful. It was a great surprise to me that my mood plummeted despite enjoying every scene, and I found myself actually depressed when GGF (who eats a healthy balanced diet with occasional tendencies towards sweets) asked for a second helping of ice-cream.
The subject of food, and a combination of memories associated with the film and current concerns about the health of a dear friend took me back to 1991. It reminded me too much of a time when I lived with a bulimic and food was fraught with danger. Bulimia nervosa is like an addiction, except that, unlike heroin or cocaine or valium, you NEED food to live, and so you must continue to eat.
This was a love relationship of the most profound kind, and even though we have been apart for seven years, although I do not want to admit it, I am still recovering. To survive, I suppressed what pain it was to live with a compulsive-obsessive. Remaining intellectually aware of the fact, the awful emotional turbulence of that time and the personal damage it cause me has been lurking in my own underground passages all this time. So I abandoned the film, and begged my girlfriend not to eat ice-cream, in a way I never did fifteen years previously. The daily fear that the messy situation would turn to tragedy – suicide a very real possibility, and an estimated 10% death rate – actually wounded me far more deeply than I realised, and it has taken me fifteen years to acknowledge.
Later the next day, we resumed the DVD and watched it to the end. I do not remember having such an extreme reaction to any film; how bizarre, I reflected next day, that I can watch horror and sleep like a baby, but this delightful comedy should plunge me into a personal abyss.
French film Delicatessen bulimia eating disorder
This thing has 3 Comments
Sounds like my kind of movie. Vaguely reminiscent of The Last Fair Deal Going Down: the brilliant, if uneven, first novel by David Rhodes.
It involved a mist shrouded pit which held the walled and gated inner city of Des Moines. You could enter, but never leave, supposedly. It was a dark, dank place…with a (rotting) meat wagon that would trundle by for the shadowy inhabitants.
It was a cryptic allegory that I still wrestle with. But not as fine a novel as his subsequent Rock Island Line, but it haunts me to this day…decades later.
Rhodes was a fine writer. Extraordinary. If only he’d been more prolific. I only know of three books.
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Food is a strangely loaded issue. I can commiserate with your feelings. There was a time when food seemed a crude and intolerably base concept to me. And I am a helluva cook!
I don’t know what to say…
THis is one of my favorite movies of all time. The opening title sequence is absolute genius. You have great taste (of course).
Thanks go to you for reminding us of it. If we yet maintained a list of favourite movies, Delicatessen would have to join.