Sweets were rationed when I was eight years old and I celebrated the day rationing ended 11 years later in 1953 by buying several pounds of chocolates and gorging until I got sick in my room in Aldershot. Fellow subalterns assumed my hangover was booze-induced and I was too ashamed to disabuse them. Just as a reformed alcoholic would have revisited his guilty past seeing The Lost Weekend, I was reminded of this experience by Chocolat, a film version of Joanne Harris's winsome novel about a catalytic chocolatière in a small town somewhere between Bordeaux and Toulouse in the late Fifties.This is a fable, a fairy tale set 15 years after World War II in a community seemingly untouched by the return of De Gaulle, the birth pangs of the Fifth Republic and the Algerian war. Television is unknown and the only touch of popular culture comes from the newly arrived young curé who sings Presley's 'Hound Dog' as he weeds the churchyard. It's also a very Anglo-Saxon affair - better than 'Allo 'Allo or Toujours Provence , more like Pagnol à l'anglais e - performed by a cast of Brits, Americans and Swedes, with just the translucently beautiful Juliette Binoche to provide an authentic Gallic touch. All the dialogue, apart from an occasional bonne journée, is in English, and when the narrator speaks of the town being devoted to tranquillité, this is immediately translated as 'tranquillity' for those at the back of the class.
Binoche plays Vianne Rocher, the magical chocolatière who arrives with her little daughter at the beginning of Lent, and rents a shop to sell magical confectionery based on ancient Mayan recipes. By Easter Sunday she's won over the hearts, minds and stomachs of this repressed, pious Catholic community. Her liberating pagan spirit works through the town's ill-treated women. She separates the lovely Lena Olin from an abusive husband (Peter Stormare), provides a sex-starved wife with chocolate aphrodisiacs for her husband, revives her lusty old crone of a landlady (Judi Dench), and so on. Her chief opponent is the xenophobic Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina) who is the local seigneur, the mayor and co-author of the priest's sermons. Incapable of confronting the choc of the new, the count declares 'a holy war' on chocolate' and subsequently stirs up a campaign against a party of riverborne travellers led by Johnny Depp (in his traditional outsider role and specifically his gypsy from last year's The Man Who Cried).
'It isn't easy being different,' remarks Binoche at one point, but in fact everything comes easy in this movie - love, reconciliation, redemption, re-creation and even death. It's also an easy film to enjoy, like most of Hallström's neatly turned, bittersweet movies about happy adjustments within disturbed families. But it's not one to think about too much or for long, and much inferior to Babette's Feast, the Danish film. The town, by the way, doesn't have a gendarme or a doctor but, Mon Dieu, it's going to need a dentist.
I've restrained myself more or less from the confectionery jokes that have preoccupied American critics. But it occurs to me that there could be a niche TV outlet for this and similar movies - Claire Denis's Chocolat, Chabrol's new picture Merci pour le chocolat, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; and perhaps Jane Campion's Sweetie, the movie of Barrie's Quality Street, Mutiny on the Bounty and Mission to Mar . It could be called The Cocoa Channel.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this article which appeared in The Observer (UK) on March 4, 2001.