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Chocolat
Directed by Lasser Hallstrom
The inevitable dramatisation of Joanne Harris' ridiculously
successful novel, Chocolat is a fairy tale with no small pretensions
and tremendous charm. Sold on the twin attractions of Juliette Binoche
and Johnny Depp, both excellent, it never goes beyond a complacent,
proud and rather facile moral fable of redemption - and that brazen
lack of ambition is largely what keeps it afloat through some fairly
rough storytelling seas. The only cynics to dislike this will be the
wanton and the sterile; this is a film with flaws aplenty, but glorious
in its own way, and glorying in its own limitations - for which modesty
all its sins are absolved.
The indecently lovely Binoche is Vianne Rocher, the wandering chocolate-making
soul whose arrival in the ludicrous world of a largely mythical provincial
France induces conservative seizure among the good townsfolk, led
by blustering petit noble Mayor Alfred Molina in a splendidly absurd
performance. She quickly sets about unleashing Satan among the meek
but by no means contented sheep of the local parish flock, largely
through the innovative weapon of chocolate-induced spontaneous orgasm.
The film's symbolism is certainly laboured: predictable layers of
tolerance, belonging and redemption fill a self-consciously uncertain
world inhabited, among others, by a sour, immensely charming aged
libertine Judi Dench; by Lena Olin as the beaten wife who turns to
Vianne for courage; and by guitar-strumming smooth-talking riverboat
traveller Roux (Johnny Depp), who mends doors and makes love with
equally stylish abandon.
Vianne is ostracized through the ludicrous efforts of the Mayor and
his puppet priest (the miraculously ingenuous Guillaume Tardieu),
but the, er, magical properties of chocolate see her through, as they
must - albeit not without some tentative stabs at moral relativism
along the way. It's an inoffensive story, richly told, and with a
messianic devotion to the bleeding obvious which is both its beauty
and its (not inconsiderable) irritant. The moral message, such as
it is, is nothing more profound than that glorious confectioned temptation
is there to be succumbed to, if only in moderation. And moderation
is the dominant sentiment here: however harsh the (North - it is a
fairy tale, after all) winds of acceptance and rejection may blow,
hot chocolate with the odd Bolivian spice in will inevitably lead
to reconciliation, a riotous sex life and the universal brotherhood
of all nations. Hardly the stuff of moral revolution, but a pleasantly
succulent piece of fluff all the same.
Thomas Hill
27.02.01
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