It is a movie about the rules and conventions of a racist society and how two intelligent adults, one black, one white, use their mutual sexual attraction as a battleground on which, very subtly, to taunt each other. It is not one of those steamy melodramatic interracial romances where love conquers all. "Chocolat" is a film of infinite delicacy. In a way so subtle that some viewers may miss it, the French woman behaves with the visiting male in such a way as to take revenge on Protee, whom she taunts because she cannot embrace. And as is often the case, the master resents the servant, as if prejudice and segregation were the fault of the class that is discriminated against. She is not interested, and yet there is a complicated dynamic at work here: She is drawn to Protee, yet cannot have him because of the racist basis of her society. One of them, young and bold, makes an implied proposition to the French woman. An airplane makes an emergency landing in the district, bearing visitors who seem exotic in this quiet place. She has a workable marriage with her husband, whom she loves after the fashion of a dutiful bourgeoise wife.īut when the husband goes away on government business, the silence in the compound seems charged with tension the man and woman who are left in charge become almost painfully aware of each other.ĭaily life for the young girl is a little lonely, but she shares secrets with Protee, too, and as she moves around the compound she has glimpses of a vast, unknown reality reaching out in all directions from the little patch of alien French society that has been planted there. His employer is a French woman in her 30s, attractive, slender, with a few good dresses and the ability to provide a dinner party in West Africa with some of the chic of Paris. Protee moves through the compound almost silently, always prompt, always courteous, always tactful. And the central fact is that Protee is the best man, the most capable man, in the district, and that her mother and Protee feel a strong sexual attraction to one another. But what is most important about the story are the things the young girl could not have known, or could have understood only imperfectly. The story is told partly through the eyes of the young girl, and the film opens in the present, showing her as an adult in 1988, going back to visit her childhood home. At an isolated outpost of the provincial government, a young girl lives with her father and mother and many Africans, including Protee, the houseboy, who embodies such dignity and intelligence that he confers status upon himself in a society that will allow him none. The film is set in a French colony in West Africa in the days when colonialism was already doomed, but no one realized it yet. It knows how quiet the land can be, so that thoughts can almost be heard - and how patient, so that every mistake is paid for sooner or later. Her ability to perceive her customers' desires and satisfy them with just the right confection, coaxes the villagers to abandon themselves to temptation - just as Lent begins."Chocolat" evokes this Africa better than any other film I have ever seen. Within days, she opens an unusual chocolate shop, across the square from the church. When mysterious Vianne and her child arrive in a tranquil French town in the winter of 1959, no one could have imagined the impact that she and her spirited daughter would have on the community stubbornly rooted in tradition.
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