Delicatessen

Every once in a while the art movie house will offer movie fare that you simply can't get at the Mutiplex location. During the 1990s, I would go to the animation festivals on Johnson Drive. Some of the animation shorts would be pedestrian, mostly Art School student animation projects. But other animation shorts would be the start of something bigger: Wallace and Gromit's The Wrong Trousers and South Park's Jesus versus Santa shorts serves as examples.
In the full-length art-house movie category, I have seen about 15-20 movies. And out of those movies, I have felt compelled to purchase only two for my Video/DVD collection. The first is Like Water for Chocolate which I added in the mid 1990s. And I added the second movie this past week: Delicatessen.
The setting for Delicatessen takes place in a post-apocalyptic apartment building where the acquisition of food seems hard to come by. The butcher, though, is always capable of producing meat through the mere cannibalistic butchering of handy men and an occasional family member of apartment occupants who can't make the monthly rent. The butcher hires Louison, an out-of-work clown, as the latest handyman. And even though the occupants expect the butchering, the butcher's daughter falls in love with Louison.
The movie is replete with wonderful site and sound gags: The wonderful pacing scene where everyone in the entire building adjusts their respective work pace to the pacings of the butcher having sex with a young woman (who I assumes is having sex with him so that she doesn't end up as meat), a wonderful short scene where Louison and the young woman try to locate a squeaky bed spring, and the creative suicide attempts by Aurore, a young, rich woman unaware that someone in the building is deliberately torturing her.
I can watch this movie over and over again.
Now, regretfully, I've never seen the movie Cinema Paradiso. But, friends say that I need to add this movie to my collection as well.
Before I forget, Delicatessen stars Dominique Pinon who later costars with Audrey Tatou in the movie Amelie.