CHOCOLATE IS DARK, dangerous and, as any self-respecting restaurant menu will tell you-while selling you 500 gratuitous calories-decadent. "Chocolat," on the other hand, is buoyant, guileless and as righteous as a decaffeinated coffee.
This doesn't mean "Chocolat" is bad. It just means it isn't chocolate.
What it is, however, represents what can most conveniently be called the Miramax Aesthetic. Once upon a time, the New York-based film company bought and distributed such audience-friendly imports as "Cinema Paradiso," "Like Water for Chocolate" and "Life Is Beautiful." Now it makes films like "Chocolat." Either way, the result is a co-opting of the exotic and/or intellectual cachet of Other Language movies, creating a kind of Foreign Film Lite-the type of movie that makes audiences feel both sated and intelligent, the way a diner does after three eclairs and a coffee with Sweet'n Low.
Lasse Hallstrom, who is apparently now devoting his career to adapting best-selling novels ("The Cider House Rules" was his last; "The Shipping News" is his next), has also made Joanne Harris' "Chocolat" a movie novel of beautiful faces. Juliet Binoche, never more conventionally glamorous, is Vianne, the mysterious chocolatier who arrives in the sleepy village of Lansquenet with her daughter, Anouk ("Poinette's" Victoire Thivisol), in a pair of Jacobin cloaks and carrying the seeds (or beans) of revolution. Her seductive chocolates and cocoa (anointed with ground chili, for one thing) turn Lansquenet, a seemingly tranquil town seething with dysfunction, into a hotbed of lust and liberal thinking.
Vianne is something of a missionary, which makes the dynamic between her and the despotic, highly Catholic town father, the Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), a little nonsensical, and certainly not a victim/perpetrator situation. Vianne is too intelligent and worldly not to realize that the arrival of a non- churchgoing, unwed mother and chocolate-making femme fatale (the time is about 1960) will turn a town like Lansquenet upside down. Still, she actively seeks out the nutty Josephine Muscat (Lena Olin), abused wife of the local tavern keeper (Peter Stormare), urging her to leave her husband. She defies the repressed Caroline (Carrie-Ann Moss) by letting her estranged mother, Armande (Judi Dench), and son, Luc (Aurelien Parent Koenig), meet under her roof. She purposely befriends the "river rats," led by Roux (Johnny Depp), just to tweak the Comte's nose. And then she acts surprised when someone retaliates.
Like the other major food movies of recent years-"Like Water for Chocolate," "Babette's Feast," "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman"-"Chocolat" is a feminist fable, more simplistic than most, perhaps, but well- meaning enough. It's pretty, picturesque and peopled, as we said, by beautiful faces. Why it was shot on location in France and England is a mystery; an aerial of Lansquenet reveals one of the cheesiest toy towns ever photographed. And no narrative thread is pursued long or hard enough to create what you'd call an emotional fabric. Still, "Chocolat" is a reasonably uplifting Christmas cookie. Even if it takes place during Lent.
This review appeared on the Newsday website on December 15, 2000 edition.