You'll be tempted to spit out Chocolat just minutes into its infuriatingly sappy opening sequence. Don't. Director Lasse Hallström goes for the weak-hearted viewers first, swooping over a breathtaking French village with the precision of a bush pilot and then using a coy voiceover to plunge us into a sad Sunday mass crammed with cheap laughs (a hungover husband snores during the hymnal). Hallström (The Cider House Rules) generously rewards patience, however, both from his audience and from his actors; whatever he lacks in spiritual heft, he firmly balances with a heady mix of suppressed desire and imperfect beauty.
As with most food-themed films, Chocolat (adapted from Joanne Harris' novel of the same name) is a fable that hesitates to delve too deeply into the moral and theological debates it orbits. Juliette Binoche is lovely as confectioner Vianne Rocher, the child of an apothecary and a mysterious nomad whose healing experiments are her legacy. It is 1959 when she and her daughter, Anouk (a decidedly un-childlike Victoire Thivisol), blow into provincial France in their matching woolen jackets, a pair of vulnerable Little Red Riding Hoods whom Hallström lovingly frames against a stormy hillside. Vianne rents an abandoned patisserie and its upstairs apartment from surly loner Amande Voizin (Judi Dench, who may well deserve another Oscar nod for her effortless grit), and her decision to open a decadent chocolate shop in the middle of Lent promptly raises the ire of the town's leader, Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina).
In this war between small minds and big hearts, any gaudy sentimentality is effectively perforated by sprightly comic relief. The town priest, portrayed by the lovable Hugh O'Conor (The Young Poisoner's Handbook), is caught singing Elvis' "Hound Dog" and sheepishly admits, "I have a weakness for American pop music." Similarly, wife-beating jackass Serge Muscat (Fargo's Peter Stormare) must bleed publicly when Comte de Reynaud forces him to apologize to his departed spouse, the mentally unstable Josephine (Lena Olin). Children howl with laughter as Serge, in a conservative navy suit, crosses the square with roses, only to have Josephine reject him. (The humiliation, however deserved, is so stinging you may even be moved to feel pity.)
Though the plot is often predictable, the cast veils most of its flaws. Binoche is as seductive as the chocolate aphrodisiacs she serves up, and neither she nor Olin is afraid to let Hallström come close, where we see that they are older than the last time we saw them, beautiful but imperfect. As the on-screen daughter of Dench's character, Matrix babe Carrie-Anne Moss convincingly plays a pinched, controlling mother who will not let her artistic young son see his diabetic grandmother. Even Johnny Depp's river-drifting hottie is no mere beefcake; his role is so small that he serves only to fulfill Vianne as she satisfies others.
And satisfy them she does: Chocolat's interpersonal collisions come fast and furious, but each is solved by Vianne's magical concoctions. In an odd way, hypnotizing images of shiny, foil-wrapped bonbons and thick slabs of cake really do silence the film's troubling questions. Why is it Vianne's duty to travel the Earth and set small minds free with her sexy secret recipes? Have a rosé crème. Why is the Comte so dead-set on ruining her — is it because his wife, who looks like Vianne, has left him? Who cares? It's so easy to be mesmerized by Chocolat's brilliant indulgences that one abandons reason altogether.
Thanks to Jan M for sending this review from Rotton Tomatoes which appeared on the Mr. Showbiz website.