The cash, which had been collected from the sale of tickets to the society’s Christmas Ceilidh, went missing between the Sunday and Wednesday of Week 10 of last term.

The news was delivered to members of the society by their current chair, Joe Hufton, at an open meeting last Wednesday.

Hufton, reading from a prepared statement, said that the incident was under police investigation and had been “recorded as a theft”. He went on to say that “the committee wish to sincerely apologise that this happened under their watch.”

The reaction to this news was one of shock and sadness.

A member of the society summed up the general feeling by telling Vision: “I think most people are a bit upset; however, the committee has dealt with this blow with the sterling professionalism and honesty that we have all come to expect of them and faith in them remains as strong as ever.”

dir. Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991

Straight up: European films can be hard to watch. There is little that is inherently different, of course, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, except for perhaps their impressively relaxed attitude to public nudity and inexplicable love of slapstick humour. But for some reason, everyone hates the film buff who whips out his Jean-Luc Godard collection at a party and tortures everyone with 6 hours of nouvelle vague. Why? Well, It’s not only the subtitles and the often ass-numbing running time, but also the fact that all the Euroflicks that manage to leapfrog the Channel only manage to do so on some very pretentious backs. This has the unfortunate result that our misguided impression of European cinema is one of hideous convolution and self-conscious introspection.
So straight up? Delicatessen is not one of those films. In fact, it’s a massively enjoyable story of awkward love, failed suicide and human meat pate. The movie is set in an alternative French past, in which an unnamed apocalypse has crippled the nation’s food supply. In the rural commune in which the film is set, grain is used as an alternative currency, but the real luxury has become human meat, supplied by the violent owner of the eponymous deli, Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). Naïve ex-circus performer Louison (Dominique Pinon) arrives to fill in the vacancy at the deli left by his digested predecessor, and soon strikes up relationships with the eclectic inhabitants of the apartments above the shop, including Clapet’s shy daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac).
Seemingly filmed not so much in sepia tone as in the middle of a nightmarish smog, with every scene drenched in burnt-out yellow, the pervasive atmosphere is one of heated and unhinged surrealism, even when nothing particularly out of the ordinary is happening. It’s also fantastically French, from some disjointed accordion in the opening theme to happily smoking children and an army of frogs and snails. The performances are solid if not exactly subtle throughout, and as the plot progresses its fascination with death is represented by some hardcore set destruction.
Essentially, the whole thing plays out like a cogent and restrained version of Terry Gilliam’s hectic Brazil. The parallels (sane man in an insane world, the resistive power of love) are sometimes hard to ignore if you’re in any way familiar with Gilliam’s movie, but such themes are hardly original in any case, and Delicatessen’s upbeat ending leaves a much more pleasant taste in the mouth than Brazil’s 1984-lite copout. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t get it all 1st time, and God knows I didn’t, but you don’t need to – just enjoy its willful idiocy, its glorious fantasy and its uniquely Gallic charm.

The whole thing started painlessly enough with our Flossie emerging onto the stage in a floaty black number that was rather less free spirited flower child than child-at-Halloween-party-dressed-as-bat whilst delivering a pretty decent rendition of Between Two Lungs. The next few songs My Boy Builds Coffins, Kiss With a Fist and Howl didn’t make a huge impression me although at this point I was beginning to enjoy myself, but not because of the quality of the music. You see, Florence, despite the fact that her ethereal oddball shtick is as convincing as Terry Wogan’s toupee, has real stage presence and really knows how to get an audience going. Even I began to become so swept up in the atmosphere of the occasion that at times I almost forgot that her singing wasn’t really in tune and that most of the songs sounded the same. The rest of the gig carried on this vein and for the most part I was moderately entertained.

Having said that, there were a couple of low points: the gig’s penultimate song, the overwrought and redundant cover of The Source’s You’ve Got The Love being the worst offender. Amazingly, this monstrosity managed to get the best reaction from the crowd who sang along with gusto. Personally, I felt like Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange, my ears clamped open by the volume of the discordant noises that emanated from the stage.

Fortunately the final songs Rabbit Heart and Dog Days Are Over, like the arrival of a new bunny after the grisly death of a beloved family pet, helped to erase any unpleasant memories of the event and ended it with a triumphant flourish. All in all, Florence and the Machine left me feeling like a Jewish man at a Nuremburg Rally; I didn’t particularly like the content but I had to admire the showmanship.

Charles Rivington