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CHOCOLAT
6/10
US
2000
dir
Lasse Hallstrom
scr Robert Nelson Jacobs (based on novel by Joanne Harris)
cin Roger Pratt
stars Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp, Alfred Molina, Judi Dench
121 minutes
The
Oscar voters were widely – and correctly – ridiculed for naming Chocolat
among their five best pictures of the year. There are, however, worse
ways of spending two hours than watching Binoche and Depp in a sweetly
romantic fable, if that’s your kind of thing. She’s Viane, who opens a
chocolate shop in a sleepy French 50s town. Her mysterious Guatemalan
recipes encourage the locals to let their hair down, but stuffy aristocrat-mayor
Molina isn’t keen on anything new or different - river-boat gypsy traveller
Depp included.
While
there’s not much here to stretch the stars, they all play it pretty straight,
with only Hugh O’Conor’s nervy young priest and Lena Olin’s battered wife
veering towards caricature – Director’s Wife Syndrome in action there,
perhaps. While it’s nice to see three generations of French actresses
represented by Binoche, child star Victoire Thivisol (Ponette)
and veteran Leslie Caron, the other characters mouth a jarring French-American
hybrid. Except Depp, of course, who gets away with a very mild Irish brogue,
despite playing a character named ‘Roux.’
Strumming
his steel guitar, Django style, in shades and leather jacket, he’s a visible
reminder that Chocolat’s 1959 setting coincides with Godard’s
A Bout de Souffle
revolutionising French cinema - though Hallstrom’s approach is firmly
from the ‘as if punk never happened’ school of picture-box prettiness.
It isn’t too fanciful to see Viane’s activities as a metaphor for Godard’s,
however, as chocolate seems to stand for just about everything and anything
except for fattening confectionery…
The
script defuses most potential lines of critical skepticism, however, by
explicitly making Chocolat a bedtime story told by a mother to
her daughter – and most audiences should be able to work out fairly quickly
who’s doing the narrating. This structure allows for all sorts of romanticised
flourishes – Binoche and Depp’s encounter on a candlelit barge being the
dreamiest, with deliberate shades of L’Atalante. In the final seconds,
there are even restrained touches of magical realism.
Chocolat
is knocked together from a well-tested recipe, with equal elements
of the nasty-mayors-upstaged-by-insurgent-libertine genre (Footloose,
Pleasantville) and the weird-newcomer-unlocks-real-selves-of-townspeople
school, which has tended mainly towards the sinister - Something Wicked
This Way Comes, Needful Things – though there are benign precedents,
such as the Tony Randall vehicle Seven Faces of Dr Lao. This is
definitely part of the feelgood school - and just as Hallstrom’s Cider
House Rules delivered a pro-abortion (or, rather, pro-choice)
message inside tearjerking melodrama, Chocolat coats its liberal
non-conformism inside a deceptively sugary exterior. The Swede’s doggedly
careful approach, however, suggests he himself could do with a couple
of jolts of that fine Guatemalan coca...
February 28th,
2001
by Neil
Young
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