Review of Chocolat (2000) by Yun K — 24 Mar 2014

There are very few moments of complete bliss in life, and, not to let my 50-year old housewife who eats her feelings for a living out, but an especially good piece of chocolate can bring that pure second of joy in an instant. That delicate crumble of cocoa melting in your mouth, the delicious taste ... all add up to a happiness that simply cannot be described - it has to be done.

The small French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes needs one of those tasty moments. Its inhabitants go to church like it's their job, attending more to save face than to actually worship. They scurry around daily in a boring routine, with attitudes so perfectly prissy that any little smidgen of a flaw is looked down upon like murder.

But when an enigmatic but kindly woman named Vianne (Juliette Binoche) comes to town along with her rambunctious 6-year old daughter (Victoire Thivisol), and opens a chocolate shop, everything is thrown out of order. After all, Vianne's daughter was born out of wedlock, and the arrival of the two corresponds with the beginning of Lent. The townspeople find Vianne to be immoral and a temptress, but in the end, who can really pass up delicious chocolate?

Throughout "Chocolat", the tug-of-war between the people of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and Vianne is one where, right off the bat, you can tell who is going to win - it's going to be Juliette Binoche, a bewitching French actress who has what appears to be the most scrumptious chocolate in the entire world.

The community themselves is filled with big-names: Judi Dench appears as a sickly but firecracker of an old woman, Lena Olin portrays an abused wife who later becomes Vianne's best friend and accomplice in chocolatiering, and Leslie Caron cameos her way through her role as an elderly object of desire.

While everyone in the town might be a bit more refined than most, it's easy to see how miserable they are. They may live in a post-card ready setting that looks like it would have the sweet scent of a fairy tale, but in truth they live in unhealthy paranoia - any bit of indulgence to them seems like a sin.

Seeing Vianne come in, break their shells, and make Lansquenet-sous-Tannes the town look the same inside and out is something of a miracle. "Chocolat" may swerve around realism, but it's so good at being glittery and warm that it makes us forget all of our troubles - and after all, isn't that what chocolate does in the first place?

It would be hard anyways, to reject such a dessert when you have a woman like Vianne behind the counter, a person so warm-hearted with no strings attached that you can't help but always feel invited to come right in. Binoche gives a terrific performance. Like the woman she portrays, she gives off a certain outreaching aura that doesn't make it hard to fall in love with her and what she is representing.

"Chocolat" is lovely to witness, lovely to hear, and lovely as a complete experience. Maintaining the clear-eyed happiness of a Technicolor film during the Hollywood Golden Age while drawing us in with its human emotion, it's a film in which you can simply sit back, and enjoy what it has to offer.