Wealth and status are relative. In one corner, you have extreme cases, like Elon Musk; in the other, you’ve got workaday ones, like Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), the landlord of a crumbling tenement building and the antagonist of Jean-Pierre Jeunte’s 1991 dystopian black comedy, Delicatessen. In Delicatessen, which has been given new, grotesque life by Severin Films’ 4K restoration, Clapet may not be rich in a monetary sense, but he’s part of the ruling class in France’s post-apocalypse. Like the property he owns, he’s timeworn, dingy, and lit in hues of bile and bleakness, qualities rarely, if ever, associated with “wealth” — only because “wealth” is usually measured in bank statements.
None of that plays a part in Delicatessen. Instead, the haves and have-nots are identified by food stores; he with the fullest larder has the most power, and those allowed access to said larder have privilege. The world beyond the walls of Clapet’s apartments is desolate, a consequence of a broadly unspecified apocalyptic event that’s rendered the land incapable of sustaining animals or raising enough crops to keep the populace fed. Clapet’s solution to this problem? Tricking hapless bozos into taking custodial work around his building, hacking them up and then expertly dividing their remains into portions of meat, which he sells to residents out of his ground-floor butcher shop. Everyone knows what they’re eating. They just go with it. What choice do they have? This is the world. So it goes.
