As if the title alone wasn’t enough of a warning, Chocolat
is almost impossibly sweet, like being water-boarded by hot chocolate. Shot in
a village that can only be described as chocolate box, it’s twee, sentimental
and exhibits practically all the worst elements of cosy women’s fiction. With Miramax
muscle behind it, this heavy-going confection briefly persuaded the world it
was some sort of easy-going arthouse picture – rather than a smug fable of
cliched situations and characters, coated in an unsettling number of scenes of
actors eating chocolate with orgasmic grins.
It will not surprise you to hear that Vianne’s arrival in
the village is the catalyst for huge change – the sort of change a trailer
would surely describe as “their lives were all starters, until she showed them
the importance of dessert”. Vianne is played by Juliette Binoche channelling
Nigella Lawson as a yummy mummy domestic goddess. Her shop operates with the
sort of business model that only exists in escapist fiction: customers spin a
sort of Rorschach wheel and whatever they see in the picture decides the
chocolate they will buy (no one would dare ask “Do you just have a box of
milktray?”). The whimsy is nearly as thick as the molten goodies in the mixing
bowl.
The village is stuffed with esteemed actors going through
the motions. Judi Dench shows Maggie Smith that she can play
crusty-old-women-with-hearts-of-gold as easily as her, as a grandmother who has
been refused access to her grandson by his over-cautious mother. (It’s the sort
of role people love to see veteran actors do, and duly landed Dench an
Oscar-nomination). With some flatly written lines, Dench provides a bit of sparkle
in a role she could play standing on her head. Carrie-Anne Moss is pretty good
as her daughter, a repressed fusspot, who won’t let her son have fun. John Wood
plays a crusty bachelor with the hots for war widow Leslie Caron. You don’t
need to be a master confectioner to mix these ingredients together into the
expected resolutions.
Hallström keeps events ticking gently along, in a film so
soothing it seems designed to help you fall asleep. For a while Hallström was
the go-to-guy for middle-brow, unimaginatively “prestige” adaptations of
middle-brow, popular novels (this was his second after The Cider House Rules
– and he had several to follow – each progressively a bit worse than the one
before). The closest genuine emotion comes from Lena Olin’s abused wife of
bullying café owner Peter Stormare. Sure, Olin’s problems are solved in about
a few minutes, but the threat to her from Stormare is an intrusion of
something that feels genuinely dramatic in what is otherwise a souffle. (Olin
gets the film’s only memorable line, whacking her husband over the head when he
attacks Vianne with the words “Who says I can’t use a skillet”, a line that’s
both rather funny and bizarrely out of place.)
Naturally, the stuffy village learning needs to learn to cut
lose a bit and embrace life, love and happiness. Alfred Molina’s Comte is the
sort of chap who browbeats the local priest (who loves himself a bit of Elvis)
into parroting the conservative sermons he’s written for him about the virtue
of being miserable. Of course, the Comte is actually a decent guy (when he
finds out what a bastard Stormare is, he banishes him at once), just
old-fashioned and as much in need of the orgasmic power of chocolate to heal
his pain as everyone else. Did Cadburys and Hersheys sponsor this film?
Just when you thought the film’s cosy warmth and supreme
heritage gentleness couldn’t get more trying, it tops itself with the arrival
of a punch of whimsical Romani people even more smackably smug than Vianne.
Worst of all they are led by Johnny Depp at his most lazily teenage dream-boat,
sporting a pony-tail and a bizarre Irish accent. He’s even more of a free-spirit
than anyone else, strumming his guitar at the drop of his hat. You’ll dream of
a hole in his boat taking him to the bottom of the Seine.
It all ends as you might expect: everyone discovers lovely
things about themselves and each other, everyone settles down, Depp and Binoche
get-it-on (and keep the relationship going as he drifts in-and-out town), the
Comte becomes a top bloke and the invisible kangaroo skips away on the North
Wind. Eat a box of Quality Street instead.
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