This week’s theme was “The Delicate Delicacies in the Delicatessen of Jean-Pierre Jeunet”. I really enjoyed The last French Cinema theme with Luc Besson, so I was hoping this week would generate a lot of things I wanted to talk about but couldn’t quite work out how to get them straight in my head. I think I liked Luc Besson’s stuff better, but I still have a fair amount of thoughts from what I watched this weekend anyway.
We started off on Saturday Night (Friday was full of birthday party shenanigans) with Amelie. A lot of people have raved about how great this film was and I’ve been meaning to watch it for ages as well, so we figured it was a good choice to start off with. An eccentric, loner girl (Audrey Tatou) decides to help people be happier through acts of whimsical kindness. In the process she encounters a similarly eccentric loner guy, falls in love and proceeds to woo him through acts of whimsical wooing-ness.
I’m not really sure how to feel about Amelie. I liked it, but I’m not sure how to feel about it. It was a very oversaturated film; the colours were really bright and vibrant, the characters all a bit wacky and over-the-top, and the plot is suitably ridiculous. I can see why, out of the five films suggested this week, this has been the most popular. People connect with the awkward characters and have hope that they too can find their special anti-social weirdo to fall in love and ride off into the sunset with.
While I did enjoy the film, and laughed aloud at some of the scenes, there were a few things about it that irritated me a bit. The biggest thing was probably the times that Amelie broke the Fourth Wall to talk to the audience. That is one of my big pet peeves, it really just ruins the immersion of the viewer, and kinda the point of a movie is to immerse the viewer into the story. Also it gets a little too saccharine after a while. These characters were so perfect, it got tiring. I mean, sure they all have issues, but there never seems to be any consequences or negatives to their issues. All in all it left me with a sad, wistful feeling at the end of the movie, like my life isn’t interesting enough. I don’t really like that feeling, or comparing myself to fictional characters and coming up lacking, so that kinda ruined the mood.
On Sunday I was home alone, so I put on Delicatessen. It’s a dystopian future where there is little to no meat left available. A butcher who is also the landlord of an apartment building gets creative when supplying his meat. Enter the new maintenance man (an ex circus performer) who is supposed to be their next meal but instead things go awry.
This was definitely not what I was expecting after Amelie. Delicatessen is just as over-the-top as Amelie, but instead of oversaturaing everything, it’s undersaturaed. The setting’s drab and depressing, the colours are all muddied, the characters are dreary, but they’re all still ridiculous. Delicatessen seemed a little more forcefully wacky than Amelie, so maybe Jean-Pierre Jeunet was still working on that balance when he made this. There is definitely a similar tone between Delicatessen and Amelie; it’s easy to see they have the same director. The characters were pretty strong, in that they were interesting and seemed to leave more of an impression than Amelie’s characters. The Troglodite characters were probably the weakest of them all, but I also think if we’d seen more of them they might have been quite interesting.
While the premise of Delicatessen was sound, it seemed to drag on a little and get a bit confused in the second half of the film. I think it was then that I started to get a bit bored with it. It’s almost as if he didn’t really know where he was going with the story, so the film starts off strong, then starts meandering in the middle, and then they realise that they need to start wrapping things up so it rushes through to ultimately get to the happy ending. That, really, is probably the biggest weakness of the film; the pacing lets it down.
The other film suggestions this week were A Very Long Engagement, Micmacs, and The City of Lost Children. I was going to watch A Very Long Engagement on Sunday after Delicatessen, but I felt more in the mood for something a bit more light-hearted than a WWI romance/detective story, so I skipped it. The City of Lost Children sounded interesting in a really really weird way, but it also sounds like the kind of film I need to watch in the middle of the day so that I don’t psyche myself out. Marc Fennell says it needs to be watched late at night to enjoy it properly, but I think this is one of those times where I ignore his advice. Either way it will probably wait a while until I have time to get around to it. Next week we’re learning about movie heists, and none of the Ocean’s series are in there, so it might be enlightening!