Reviewed by David Steinberg
(2/28/01)
Lasse Hallström's charming film, Chocolat, pulls off a rather impressive
and tidy little trick. It points a perceptive finger at some important issues
that lie behind our culture's deeply ingrained fear of pleasure. But it does
so in such a matter-of-fact, wholesome, unobjectionable way that everyone
gets to walk out of the theater with a warm-in-the-belly pleasure-positive
feeling unspoiled by the familiarly bitter aftertaste of grappling with
issues that are complex and controversial.
On its surface, Chocolat is little more than a fairy tale celebrating
pleasure over repression, generosity over miserliness, compassion over moral
judgment. You've got your good guys and your bad guys, as easy to tell apart
as they were in the Westerns where the good guys wore white Stetsons and the
bad guys wore black. In Chocolat, the good guys (those ready to be amicably
seduced into pleasure) wear winning smiles and move their bodies with
graceful ease, while the bad guys (those perennially on guard against their
pleasure-seeking impulses) offer stern frowns and move around with stylized
rigidity.
The two camps are, of course, fated to do battle with each other as certainly
as God must with Satan, or Wyatt Earp with the Clanton Gang. The climax,
predictable as Armageddon or the showdown at the O.K. Corral, comes on Easter
Sunday when a Pagan fertility ritual crosses the path of more conventional
homage to both the mystery of the Resurrection, and the release of the film's
townsfolk from the restrictions of Lent.
Juliette Binoche plays Vianne, a traveling shaman (witch, some would say)
whose mission is to "unlock inner yearnings and reveal destinies" through the
medium of chocolate mixed with cayenne -- a recipe for pleasure and insight
supposedly going back to the mysteries of ancient Mayan eroticism. She and
her smart, willful, no-nonsense daughter blow into town -- a very small, very
provincial, very French, very Catholic, very pleasure-fearing town, if you
please. Vianne is a female incarnation of the archetypical outside agitator so
familiar to Hollywood classics -- the mysterious, devilish stranger whose
very appearance spells disruption for the previously bounded, protected, and
restricted universe of the group s/he stumbles across.
Vianne's instruments of revolution are the apparently irresistible sensuality
of chocolate combined with her uncanny ability to see into the heart and soul
of each villager she meets. She is assisted by a Mayan Rorschach-like plate
onto which the town's pleasure seekers unselfconsciously project their secret
hopes and fears. One by one, Vianne identifies, sanctifies, and encourages
each of the villager's forbidden desires with a smile, a wink, and the
chocolate goody she knows will most deeply arouse them. Since the passions
she unearths turn out to be rather innocent, the result is quick and
immediate happiness for all but the most dedicated prudes.
Hallström's tone in Chocolat is gentle and playful, never harsh and
confrontational. The film's few excursions into the troublesome realities of
hate and violence come and go quickly, and resolve with almost magical ease.
An abusive husband is tamed with no more harm done than a little broken
glass, cheerfully swept up by the unflappable and ever-beautiful Binoche.
Even the more substantial destruction wrought by the town's lone vigilante is
rendered innocuous by the carefree spirit of a band of itinerant river people.
There is none of the horror of Boys Don't Cry here (where the released
passions of transgendered Brandon Teena result in his rape and murder), nor
even the lesser unpleasantries of Quills (where the transgressive passions
of the Marquis de Sade bring about both his suppression and his death). Films
like Boys Don't Cry and Quills force us to confront the very real
devastation that is manifested daily by the decidedly uncharming agents of
sexual intolerance and pleasure phobia.
But Chocolat -- whose unleashed pleasures result in nothing more
controversial than the consumption of sensual foods, a bit of flirting and
dancing, and the extension of marital, heterosexual sex into middle and old
age -- studiously avoids the explosive realities of sexual and pleasure
diversity. Instead it focuses on the more general idea of enthusiastically
embracing the very concept of pleasure itself.
Despite these gross simplifications, Chocolat is more than just another
Disneyesque piece of fluff. Pathetically, in this twisted little culture of
ours, even the idea of actively pursuing pleasure is decidedly suspect, and
Chocolat ever so sweetly points out that even the most innocuous embrace of
pleasure has consequences that are both subtle and controversial,
particularly with regard to women's societally designated roles and their
gender-related disempowerment.
Chocolat draws the connection between the suppression of pleasure and the
suppression of our animal natures, the suppression of artistic creativity,
the suppression of Third World cultures, and (most fundamentally) the
suppression of women across the board. It is no accident that the film's
priestesses of pleasure are a strong, independent woman who proudly asserts
that she has never been married, and her equally strong, independent daughter
who quips, argues, and gambles with the best of the men. These are women who
are dependent on men for neither their financial nor their emotional
well-being, and anyone who attempts to treat them otherwise is in for a rude
awakening.
The chocolaterie that Vianne opens becomes the one place in town where
transgressive women can meet, talk, and encourage each other in their various
rebellions against assigned roles and constrained feelings. Armande Voizin --
a crusty, wise sharp-tongued grandmother (played to Oscar perfection by the
wonderful Judi Dench) -- reveals how she has for decades been scorned by her
excessively proper daughter because, she says, "I swear, I read dirty books,
I eat and drink what I like."
Josephine, a battered wife who is dismissed by everyone in town as insane, is
quick to declare, sanely enough, that all it takes to be seen as crazy is for
a woman to refuse to cheerfully perform all the tasks of the proper wife.
Under the influence of Vianne and her chocolates, Josephine soon skips out on
her abusive husband, takes refuge in the chocolaterie, and confirms her
independence by physically triumphing over her husband when he tries to force
her to return to him. "The worst is over," Armande reassures a shaky
Josephine in the sanctity of the chocolate shop the day after the
confrontation. "You have shown him what you are made of."
Vianne herself, in an angry confrontation with the town's mayor and
staunchest moralizer (his creed is "hard work, modesty and self-discipline"),
makes clear that she is not about to "shrivel up and blow away" when the
mayor threatens to drive her out of business and out of town. Her
determination to challenge the status quo is seconded by Armande, who wants to
flaunt the ethic of pleasure by throwing a grand birthday party for herself,
even if it happens to fall on Good Friday. "Let's show the bastards we're
ready to go down dancing," she declares with all the fire and eloquence of
Emma Goldman.
While Lasse Hallström might be the last to see her this way, Vianne as the
traveling ambassador of pleasure is cast in precisely the role once assigned
to sacred whores -- priestesses who became skilled in the arts of pleasure
for the purpose of bringing spiritual enlightenment to both themselves and
the people around them. Not surprisingly, the outrage and condemnation Vianne
encounters from the men and moralists who are determined to tell everyone
what to do and (more significantly) what not to do, are hostilities
well-known to women of pleasure everywhere.
Indeed, Vianne's chocolaterie performs -- in a kinder, gentler way -- many
of the functions more commonly associated with small town brothels and, once
upon a time, with urban pleasure houses as well. This is the place in town
devoted to the undisguised pursuit of pleasure, where pleasure is valued for
its own sake, where the anti-pleasure attitudes of society-at-large are to be
left at the door, a place that provides the women in its sphere with a
sisterhood and degree of financial independence impossible for them to find
elsewhere. Indeed, it is to a large degree because these parallel
pleasure-houses perform these very functions that they are also fated to be
condemned and assaulted by all those who see pleasure not as a source of
sanity and self-expression but as being essentially the work of the devil.
In the fairy tale world of Chocolat, it is the evil of enjoying chocolate
that is associated by the town moralists with the sinister stranger lurking
outside the school yard, that is equated with "slovenly pleasure that will
contaminate our town and the innocence of the children," and that is
dismissed as just another of "Satan's many disguises" -- exactly the sorts of
epithets used in the real world by crusaders against the supposed evils of
pornography and prostitution. Mayor Reynaud's campaign rallying townspeople
to "boycott immorality" in the name of "family, church, and community" could
be taken almost word for word from any of the many decency campaigns and
boycotts that were organized, for example, in many metropolitan centers at
the turn of the century by anti-prostitution zealots.
As (y)our new President makes clear that he intends to unleash society's
most rabid anti-pleasure dogs without delay, we can only hope that the
townspeople of our cosmopolitan yet provincial world take to heart not only
the film's honey-coated defense of pleasure, but also its closing sermon. In
it, Père Henri, the wide-eyed, Elvis-Presley-loving town cleric, suggests to
his parishioners that "we can't measure our goodness by what we don't do, by
what we resist, but only by what we embrace, what we do, and who we include"
in our universe of love and concern.
Chocolat