highlowconcept: Sample

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Written by Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Directed by Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet Release Dates: France 1991, USA 1992

The High: Delicatessen takes place in one location, a tenement building, in a future where animals are scarce and carnivores are desperate. A brutish butcher is the landlord, and his are party to (and often victim of) his deadly measures to get fresh meat.

The Low: Our diminutive protagonist, Luison (Dominique Pinion) a circus performer mourning the death of his performing partner, a chimp called Mr. Livingstone. He answers an ad put out by the butcher seeking a handyman and is hired on the spot.

By the end of 1980's, Earth's dystopian future (or alternate present) had been presented ad nauseam in science-fiction, with films such as Planet of the Apes, Fahrenheit 451, Blade Runner and the Mad Max series. This setting even proved succuessful backdrop for comedy in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Leave it to the French to use such a setting for the back-drop to a dark romantic comedy. It's never been done successfully unless you include the director-boycotted Love Conquers All edit of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Irony aside, there's no question as to why Terry Gilliam helped introduce Delicatessen to American audiences. It's dark tone, anti-authoritarian themes and visual slapstick are blood-relatives to Gilliam's Monty Python cutout animations.

I'm looking at Delicatessen from a high/low concept standpoint, but audiences at the time had no frame of reference for this French export. It was certainly nothing like the romantic, soft-lit Merchant-Ivory fare that had become synonymous with foreign film. And the trailer didn't help; trailers are often cut to condense a film into a simple marketing statement. The theatrical preview for Delicatessen offered no handy genre labels, but presented the film's setting and comic absurdity as bait for adventurous viewers:

The opening sequence introduces the desolate location, the antagonist and sets the cartoonishly menacing tone for the film:

The opening also establishes the building's resonant plumbing, which serves to connect the lives of the colorful residents of the tenement house. A unifying location is a common element of High/Low concept stories, and many successful comedies. Like Punxatawny, PA in Groundhog Day, the location and the ensemble provide much of the charm and intrigue of this often dark film.

The ensemble and the world also provide the protagonist with varying points of view on the conflict, and provide the "why we fight" of the story. In Delicatessen the building's above-ground residents — including the butcher's daughter and lover — are resigned to their fate to as dinner. Yet beneath the surface the Troglodystes live in a darker world with a brighter outlook — we don't have to dine on our neighbor to survive.

The protagonist, Luison, helps create harmony in the brutal world he encounters. He's somewhere between Sam Lowry in Brazil and Jacques Tati; a straight-faced clown, forced into the role of rebel. And regardless of his small stature and quiet demeanor, he brings magic to the story through circus tricks and his biggest feat — optimism among the bleak surroundings.

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Click the link for the "Bubble Scene."

What's a high/low comedy without a signature tune? Truly, Madly, Deeply makes great use of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio; "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paginini" is on loop in Groundhog Day. In this picture it's "Duo" (with cello and saw). A charming tune that appears during the b-story and the end to breathe love and hope into the procedings.

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