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