K-SCORE: 57
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Based on: Chocolat by Joanne Harris
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Johnny Depp
Spoiler Level: None
I don’t often go for period anything, but had Chocolat on Netflix because I have a vague recollection of Jessica once telling me it was her favorite movie, and, well, I just can’t resist the urge of taking my favorite people’s favorite things and obliterating them. Alright, no, it was fine.
“Some people really need to get beaten with the bludgeon of perspective.”
Chocolat is the story of a mother and daughter who stir up trouble in the stuck-up hyper-religious small French town to which they move at the beginning, mostly by opening up a chocolaterie. The film has a plot and characters with motivations that make sense, which put it in a place of being superior to many, but I really didn’t love it.
For one thing, it’s thematically obvious, the chocolates being a metaphor for life’s indulgences. And worse, the characters are humorless, even the ones so depraved as to, well, like chocolate. I get frustrated with stories like this in the same way I get frustrated watching anything that involves wealthy British people. They just care so much about the most inconsequential, mundane, and mild of issues that I want to scream, “Do something meaningful with your lives!” An “edgy” chocolatier opening up a store in your town is so insignificant a conflict as to not be a conflict in my mind, making the stick-in-the-mud antagonists like Alfred Molina’s character beyond annoying.
There is something real about them though. Sadly. (The wealthy residents of Hunting Valley consider important issues things like: type of stone adorning the front of the street or how close I can get to their houses when walking my dog or who’s going to manicure the lawns of the unsold adjacent properties.) But Chocolat, like other period pieces, doesn’t take the approach that the conflicts are petty; it cares about them as much as its characters. Some people really need to get beaten with the bludgeon of perspective. So the film ends up frustrating.
Most of all though, Chocolat is far too slow. The film has many scenes with very little dialogue or action yet take up quite a bit of time, during which I presumably was supposed to be soaking up the imagery or hearkening back to a simpler age or relishing in the idea of living in a little French village. Instead I was thinking about how I wished I was watching a story about the history of chocolate or the greatest chocolate artisan in a hundred generations or someone that uses chocolate as a weapon to combat a villain that seeks to eradicate all flavor from the world by adding to everything whatever they put in toothpaste that makes its taste linger in your mouth. I suppose I wasn’t the target audience.