At some point, it had to be done--a feel-good movie about a woman and how she makes the world a better place with her chocolate confectionery. And that it takes the form of the pretty, foil-wrapped Chocolat really doesn't come as a surprise.
What essentially makes Chocolat a pretty fairy-tale movie is the radiant Juliette Binoche, who plays Vianne, a wandering chocolatier who bases her craft on ancient Mayan traditions. She arrives with her daughter in a small town in France, where she's immediately ostracized by the god-fearing townsfolk when she opens up shop just in time for Lent. This doesn't stop her though, and she uses her mysterious chocolate concoctions to win over the town.
Her landlord, the acerbic Amande (Judi Dench) is an easy sell. Determined not to be shipped away to a home for the elderly, she quickly takes to both Vianne's free-spirited nature and the chocolate drink she prepares for her each time she visits. Then there's Josephine (Lena Olin), the battered wife with klepto tendencies who leaves her husband to become Vianne's apprentice. The three of them quickly form a knitting club of secrets and promises, and together they try to keep the shop in business, at least until Easter Sunday.
This won't be easy. The mayor, the Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina) has the last word on the sermons of the town's new priest, and when he discovers that Vianne is a single mother and makes truffles on Sunday mornings instead of attending church, he convinces most of the town that she is a cursed woman.
But how is the town supposed to believe this when Vianne's creations are rekindling marriage flames and shooting cupids' arrows at lonely old people? Slowly, residents begin to warm to Vianne, and in return, she makes more chocolate.
By this point, it's clear that this chocolatier isn't your ordinary Hershey bar. Which is fine, except for the fact that her daughter has become sick of following her from town to town, and wants to lead a normal life with real friends, instead of an imaginary kangaroo for a playmate. So now Vianne must choose between her role as an individual who can skip town whenever she pleases and that of the mother who has to look out for the interests of her daughter.
Chocolat dabbles in this and other domestic issues, like abuse of spouses and parents, but Vianne and her friends seem too preoccupied with satisfying the town's sweet tooth to really address their own problems, which seem to solve themselves with a light dusting of cocoa. The exception to this could be Amande's determination to fulfill her dying wish, but all the same, Chocolat drowns these issues, leaving them sugary, milky and easy to digest. How convenient it is that chocolate is used as the substitute for all of the town's problems.
The arrival of the Irish river rat Roux (Johnny Depp) doesn't really change things, either, and he becomes just another one of Vianne's causes, to get the town to accept him and his band of wanderers. Of course, as expected, sparks fly between Vianne and Roux, but it could just as easily be the chocolate talking.
To be fair, though, the film's cast does manage to keep this fairy tale moving, with Binoche's velvety charm smoothing over Dench's crusty exterior. But their characters seem too good to be true, and it turns out that the uptight comte is the one who lends to the film's most touching scene, in which he lets loose his inhibitions and spends the night in the shop's display case. In the end, though, despite its fancy packaging, Chocolat melts in your hand, not in your mouth.
The movie opens April 28.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review which appeared in the The Daily Yomiuri (JP) on April 26, 2001 and for the picture, which is a detail from a larger promo for the film.