The females rule in Chocolat, which begins with a woman (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter blowing like Gallic Mary Poppinses into a French provincial town where they're intent on practicing the pagan art of chocolate making. Our heroine sets about liberating the townspeople from repression with her truffles and bonbons and hot cocoa, all mixed with chili pepper—a happy drug, an aphrodisiac, a panacea of pleasure, a call to libertarianism and tolerance. Families are reunited; sex drives in long-married couples are restored; a sour grandma (Judi Dench) is reconciled to life; a battered woman (Lena Olin) is liberated from her abusive husband and moves into the chocolate shop and back into the society of humans.
Who could object to this gorgeous and sophisticated savior? Well, this is a Catholic town steeped in tradition, and the grinchy mayor (Alfred Molina) doesn't approve of "self-gratification," especially during Lent and especially delivered by an unwed mother who refuses to go to church. Damn that chocolate strumpet!
For the first half of Chocolat, the liberal, life-affirming whimsy made my teeth ache, but the director, Lasse Hallström (last year's Cider House Rules), knows how to build a house, even a house made of something brown and runny that isn't chocolate. He does solid work. Binoche wears her magician's cape lightly, and she and Olin (both veterans of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988) have a teasing intimacy. Even Johnny Depp, who shows up as a hippie river-rat with a beard, guitar, and Irish accent, doesn't ram the beatnik poetry thing down our throats. But the movie is barely sufferable. It encourages us to pat ourselves on the back for our enlightened tolerance, but anyone who could find something wrong with this great cook, devoted mother, and protector of abused women probably isn't allowed to go to the cinema in the first place.
Pictures like Chocolat and Quills bring out the William Bennett in me. No, that's not true: The lies of the left strike me as a lot less destructive than the lies of the right. But I expect more of my own tribe—an ability to cope with ambiguity, to grasp that movies are a dramatic medium and that both sides of a political or religious struggle should be fairly represented. Thank you, Miramax, for making the brave, urgent case for self-gratification.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this review which appeared in Slate Magazine on December 14, 2000.