Laughter in the Ruins

First of all, I may be wrong here....but wasn't Caro Marc the same feller who did "City of Lost Children"? It has been many years since I saw that movie.... but the post-Apocalyptic beauty of both stories and the lushly-produced worlds created by same would seem to show the same unique fingerprints...
In any case, "Delicatessen" surprised me. Rather than focusing on the savagery of a world where resources are so scarce that cannibalism is an accepted fact in the news, Marc creates a landscape where the struggle for survival has spawned some of the weirdest situations that one cannot help but find gut-bustingly funny.
"Delicatessen" is a comedy hidden in a hotel somewhere between "Mad Max" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Like "Life Is Beautiful", the story is so powerful that even those with the most Beavis and Butt-head sentiments about movies with subtitles would not mind them here.
Without cutting open the golden goose of interwoven plot details within this work.... one scene that demonstrates Marc's finesse at creating comedy after the end of the world occurs toward the middle of the movie. We have seen that the butcher sells "long pig", so to speak. The shock of the whole cannibalism angle has slightly worn off (to be replaced with the sight of things like a man who lives with a veritable herd of toads in a flooded room, and other unanswered facts of life in that madhouse.) And we are focused more on the life of a circus clown who has come to work at the hotel as a maintenance man.
The clown has made a harness of his own suspenders, and is painting the ceiling of one room. His rhythm in painting, as well as that of every other activity in the hotel, takes on the same rhythm as the sounds of duelling bedsprings from the butcher and his wife upstairs, which are echoing through the pipes in the entire building. When the inevitable fireworks occur at the end of the coupling... the suspenders snap, the strings of the cellist upstairs (whose playing has gone from soothing Baroque to Laurie Anderson power-chords by this time) snap; the guy pumping up his bike tire blows it out, ...etc.
In that scene, the symbolism, the moment....and the way it all comes together, are the kind of writing that far surpasses run-of-the-mill sf movies and approaches a crossbreed between The Addams Family, the works of Tim Burton, and a caliber of writing on a level with Ray Bradbury. Leave your pretensions at the FBI Warning. "Delicatessen" is not just art. It's great fun as well. And that is exactly as it should be.