Delikatessen" - gorgeous French movie. The images look like vintage color photos. The plot? In a building owned by a butcher, where he also had his shop; the butcher killed people and he with the others inhabitants of the building eat the human flesh. He would hire a helper in the house, like a guy that can do all the job, fixing electric wiring, plumbing, etc., and at one point he would butcher him. But the butcher has a daughter, that wears glasses, is blonde, and plays cello. One day a guy answers his add in the paper for hiring a help; he's used to work in a circus, as a clown and had a partner (that proves later to have been an ape) named Livingstone. And, of course he and the butcher daughter fall for each other. She tries to save him, so she goes for help to these "troglodites" - people that lived in the sewage underground system of that town. And, of course, after a hard struggle, the 2 manage to escape the butcher and his knives. The butcher dies, and the couple live happily ever after.

The movie is absolutely charming, with all that macabre and dark humor. And greatly done. A symphony made of the noises created during daily activities - a girl playing her cello, a couple having sex on a squeaky bed (the butcher and the slut of the building), a work shop creating stuff for telephone receivers, an old woman knitting, and former clown doing some repair, another guy blowing condoms - I think he was trying to recycle them or something, etc, and he was checking to see if they inflate without breaking. Or a wonderful duo of cello and saw. Or the guy that lived in a flooded apartment with frogs, toads and slugs and listening loud to fanfare music. Or the two kids that did kids stuff, like stealing lace undies of the building's tramp, or trying to steal toads from the guy that lived in the flooded apartment, or pouring nitro-glicerine in the gun of the post-man that was coming to their building daily, bringing parcels sent by the butcher to his daughter, and also having a crush on that girl.

What time this take place? By the way they dress, it looks like in the '50s, but there's this period of economic low, people don't use money anymore, they exchange goods like in the last years of WW2 and first years of its aftermath, but they have TV sets, with a full TV programm, and also walkie-talkies, which, as far as I know, have been widely spread in the 1980s.

"The Hunger" - book by Knut Hamsun. I discovering the Norwegian literature, and it's a great one. A hidden gem really. Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for "Hunger", but... now he's almost forgotten because he sympathized with the Nazis and was friends with Hitler and admired him. But he's an awesome writer. "The Hunger" is a detailed presentation of what goes through this really poor guy, a diagnosis and a description of the symptoms of his "illness" - the hunger. He's almost homeless, a vagrant, but in the same time he has this pride, he wouldn't beg for money, for example. He does a lot of silly and foolish stuff, in exchange. He almost loses his mind because of the hunger, ending up doing all the crazy things, from talking to himself, to giving away his only money to random strangers. The story has some sort of happy ending, because he gets a job on a ship going to Liverpool.

And I'm currently reading "La Pelle", "The Skin", by Curzio Malaparte, a story placed in WW2, in a Neapole "freed" by the Americans and their allies debarked in 1943 to free Europe of the German occupation. Malaparte wrote against Mussolini and Hitler, and done some jail time because of this, time during he started writing. After the war he even joined the Italian Communist Party. I'll talk more about this book when I'll be done reading it. For now I'll say only that I'm very much into his style of writing. He combines sarcasm, irony, with this very rich description, almost dreamy. The misery of a conquered town and of people drove to do the most atrocious things out of poverty, are turned into this very beautiful drawn image, in the best colors, with magnificent metaphors.

Labels: books, curzio malaparte, delikatessen, film, France, Italy, knut hamsun, Norway, reading, WW2