"Chocolat" isn't good for you, but that won't stop this crowd-pleasing fable from being consumed with delight by a segment of the moviegoing audience. The movie begins as a simple fairy tale, but by the time director Lasse Hallstrom ("The Cider House Rules") is through, it has turned into a ridiculously heavy-handed screed against intolerance, religion and anyone who would dare choose to live with a measure of self-restraint. It's all about as subtle as being hit in the head with a brick of double-chocolate fudge.In the opening moments, a voice-over informs us that life hasn't changed in the French village of Lansquenet for the last 100 years. Tradition reigns supreme. As one character puts it: "If you don't go to church, you won't last long. You don't misbehave here. One must pretend."
Into this unhappy little hamlet come Vianne (Juliette Binoche) and her pixie daughter Anouk (Victorie Thivisol). The two open a chocolate shop just as the town prepares to deprive themselves of life's little pleasures for Lent. It's not the best of timing, but then Vianne doesn't believe in God, so the complaints of the town's mayor (Alfred Molina in full-blown Snidely Whiplash mode) fall on deaf ears.
Vianne is in touch with some paranormal power and has a way of divining just what kind of chocolate each villager needs. She gives a bag of sweets to a sex-starved wife, and the woman comes back the next day, looking to buy out the shop's supply. A 70-year-old curmudgeon, Armande (Judi Dench), lightens up when she takes a swig of Vianne's hot chocolate.
Others prove to be harder cases. Josephine initially steals from Vianne's shop, but once we meet her husband (Peter Stormare), we realize kleptomania is the least of her problems. Armande is estranged from her daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss), a rigid disciple of the mayor who doesn't approve of her mother's free-spirited ways. Caught in the middle is little Luc (Aurelien Parent Koenig), who wants to obey his mother, but misses spending time with his grandmother.
But the biggest obstacle is the mayor himself, who promises Vianne that her shop will be closed by Easter. His beef: Vianne, with her red shoes and free-thinking, godless ways, poses a threat to the town's morality. If the villagers start gorging themselves on chocolate, can opium be far behind?
To be fair, Robert Nelson Jacob's ham-fisted screenplay isn't that outlandish -- it just feels that way. "Chocolat" is fine and sometimes quite funny and charming when the filmmakers let it be what it should be -- a simple fable. But when Hallstrom ups the ante and attempts to give the story more weight than it can bear (the town's treatment of a visiting troupe of gypsies is more or less equated with the beginning of the Holocaust), "Chocolat" melts down and becomes a big, gooey mess.
Binoche and Dench are fine as always, and Johnny Depp gets in a few good licks as a Django Reinhardt-like guitar-playing gypsy. The movie has plenty of fun pitting its archetypical characters against one another and contains some of the most decadent feasting scenes in recent film history. It's too bad the filmmakers couldn't leave well enough alone and salute the power of self-indulgence without becoming so self-indulgent themselves.
Thanks to Jan M for sending this review from Rotton Tomatoes which appeared in the The Los Angeles Daily News. The photo at the top was taken from the Miramax official web site.