Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Delicatessen
1991 · Jean-Pierre Jeunet · Delicatessen on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the color: everything soaked in amber, rust, and shadow. (light)
Darius Khondji drops faces and objects into pools of warm light with heavy dark around them. No daylight, no clean white, nothing cool. The jaundiced tone never lifts, indoors or out.
Payoff: You stop reading the building as a backdrop and start reading it as something alive and unwell. In the reading: expressionism. That light-and-shadow gradient giving non-living things a life of their own is what the reading calls expressionism.
Wait for the bedsprings to squeak, then watch the whole building. (cutting)
A cello bow, a bicycle pump, a paintbrush, a ceiling whisk. Hervé Schneid cuts a dozen private chores into one accelerating rhythm, and the tenement speeds up together without knowing it.
Payoff: The cutting makes the tenants one body rather than ten neighbors, and the rest of the film runs on that. In the reading: dividual. A crowd pulsing as a single unit is what the reading calls the dividual, and the cross-cutting is the proof.
Notice how the lenses bend the walls of these cramped rooms. (camera)
Khondji shoots wide, low, and canted, with the camera prowling through stairwells and plumbing. Rooms look bigger and more warped than they can be. Straight lines curve near the frame edge.
Payoff: The distortion keeps you inside a drawn world rather than a photographed one, closer to a comic panel than a room.
Listen for the drips, creaks, springs, and scraping metal under every scene. (sound)
The building hums, ticks, and complains without pause. Carlos D'Alessio's musette-tinged score drifts over the top of it, nostalgic and sweet, pulling against everything the noises tell you.
Payoff: The noise says machine, the music says lost world, and holding both at once is how the film keeps cruelty funny.
Look at every surface: rust, water stains, junk built into machines. (setting)
Marc Caro dressed all of it. Each room states its tenant's obsession before anyone speaks, and the contraptions actually work. You are never shown the ruined country outside.
Payoff: The apocalypse arrives as texture instead of spectacle. You learn the state of the world by reading walls.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: The building is one body. Watch what it does in rhythm, and who manages to stay out of step.