In Delicatessen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro masterfully employ all five senses throughout the story to convey certain moods and themes, especially color and sound. In doing so, they create an intensely surreal environment. There are bold hues of yellows, reds, and oranges in the majority of the film’s scenes. These warm shades automatically create a welcoming, sunny disposition, despite the war-ridden reality of the world in which the characters live. Real life isn’t composed of monochrome colors, so watching an the entire world unfold where everything seems to visually connect is a powerful and unique experience. On the other hand, it almost makes you grateful for the variety and occasional colorless, drab moments in your own life, as it allows you a bit of a minimalist break. Personally, while I find the mustard yellows and dusty oranges to be particularly vivid and beautifully rendered, seeing the same palette in different scenes quickly becomes overwhelming. There seems to be some sort of haze or fog that fills the rooms, a detail that is equal parts claustrophobic, dream-like, and suffocating.

Additionally, Jeunet and Caro uses different color families to distinguish between different people. For example, the first time we see Clapet, the butcher, he is physically looming over our point of view in a wash of yellow. He is almost exclusively presented in darker shades of this color, which gives him an almost sickening, dreading presence. Later, when he is threatening one of the apartment’s tenant’s mother, he is heavily drenched with saturated hues of yellow and orange. In this scene, we witnessed his unhinged nature as he screamed and brandished his butcher knife like a true madman. It was exceedingly disturbing to watch how this world’s famine crisis seemed to push him over the edge, while he proceeded to laugh in a sadistic manner.

On the other hand, another tenant of the apartment is always presented by green and red. In fact, her entire home is only colored by these two colors. This character, Silvie, is most notably characterized by her elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque suicide attempts that always fail. As colors on their own, red, orange, and yellow are complementary to blue, purple, and green. This also corresponds to the contrast between warm and cool colors. Visually, Silvie’s green room and bathroom is welcome break on the eyes from the onslaught of the warm palette that makes up the rest of the film. Her space has a surreal quality to it because it is covered in the color of trees and nature while the rest of the world is a post-war, famine-ridden, desolate wasteland. Additionally, her and her brother are of a higher class; their apartment is filled with expensive-looking objects and lavish furniture. Clearly, they are outliers in their socio-economic status; the rest of the world is barely surviving, and the tenants are only able to eat because of their desperate, murderous means. Silvie, however, seems to be concerned with fulfilling the opposite of survival, suicide and death. Both Silvie and her little world stands in startling contrast to the themes we see in the rest of Delicatessen.