Even Juliette Binoche is hard to swallow in Lasse Hallstrom's Oscar-nominated Chocolat, a sickeningly sweet and cynical confection

IN a sense, this week's column is a continuation of last week's, as Chocolat, the new movie from Lasse Hallstrom, might be understood to come bounding and panting out of the same kennel as Finding Forrester, a slick, Oscar-hungry extravaganza made by a director previously known for originality. There is something truly carnivorous about Hallstrom's new-found sentimentality, though he likes his sweet on the same plate, as Chocolat will testify.

Juliette Binoche plays Vianne Rocher, a nicely dressed woman who comes to a tranquil French village with her daughter. They arrive in red cloaks, but you quickly find that is not the only colour they bring to the town. Vianne rents a shop from a thoroughly fed-up old bird called Armande Voizin (Judi Dench) which she turns into a chocolaterie, an unlikely establishment which looks like something that Coco Chanel would design for Willy Wonka.

As soon as the shop opens, it is visited by the local mayor, and all-round big guy, the Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), who takes an immediate dislike to this beautiful single mother and to her penchant for pleasure. You can tell that this is a town that could do with a bit of marshmallowing - Vianne is just what they need, but just what they hate. She is so sweet to everyone, and gives them so many sweets, that soon they are all getting thoroughly happy. Except for Reynaud, who is invested with all the loveliness-hating qualities possessed by the priest in Joanne Harris's novel, while the priest in the movie, a young, baby-faced lover of American pop music, is firmly under Reynaud's formidable thumb.

Reynaud is in pain, of course: his wife has left him. And the woman who works for him, Armande's daughter, won't speak to her mother, angry at Armande's refusal to go into hospital despite her illness. Armande is punished by not being allowed to see her grandson - something, like everything, that our heroine, Vianne, tries to put right - and Reynaud's bitterness, the key opposition to the sweetness of the chocolaterie, is getting sharper by the day. Meanwhile, another lovely girl, Josephine (Lena Olin), who is thought by everyone to be quite mad, takes refuge with Vianne and her daughter at the shop after her husband beats her up.

The film, like the novel on which it is based, is filled with a fairy-tale-like ambience. Sweeping into town on the wind, the mother and daughter come with their strange, mystical healing properties, a new broom to sweep out the problems of the town, but all the while they are also sweeping a little too much dust under the carpet of their own lives. The daughter is tired of wandering from town to town; they always move on when objections to their voodoo become too much. But this time they want to stay. Like the best healing heroes in sentimental fiction, they are slightly in need of a dose of their own medicine. This is a trope, indeed, that Hallstrom has come to like: his last film, The Cider House Rules, based on another light literary book, is a story in which the person who does everybody a lot of good is secretly doping himself up against pain. It gets the audience every time.

The people who dole out Academy Awards love this sort of thing - they always have. They must include at least one of these pretty, faux-European, life-is-meaningful schlockfests every year, and this year it is Chocolat. They are the kinds of film that Hollywood mistakes for class: a bit of sophisticated skirt (hopefully Binoche), a dreary, lovely, workaday world (hopefully Italy, England, France or, at a push, New England) ready to be reordered by some blast of strange charisma or genius. They are usually supported by Miramax (Life Is Beautiful, The English Patient, The Cider House Rules, Good Will Hunting), which campaigns mercilessly for Oscars, and which very often gets them, having cottoned on to the fact that this kind of movie, with its sheen of independence and low budget, is seen to fulfil some commitment to the idea of cinematic finesse.

It is all dross. Binoche's character is here a lightly powdered bonbon, nice to look at but hard to swallow, with trite solutions to everything. Judi Dench, who nowadays gets nominated for Oscars for stepping out of the bath, and who is taken to be the hallmark of character-depth in motion pictures, is actually just playing the crankily sensitive old dame she always plays, being bold and curmudgeonly and able to put a brave face on her woes. She has nothing to do here but bark and squeak, inciting friends and enemies alike to admire her fortitude. Criticising Dench is like criticising the Queen - a role perfectly suited to her gifts - but she is not one of the great actresses. She has been too happy to bathe in a certainty of what she is good at - great screen actresses, such as Bette Davis or Jeanne Moreau, never do that.

Alfred Molina is more fun as the raging Reynaud, who is a bit of a cartoon character, but better developed than most of the others. While the people who go to the chocolaterie are lifted by the aphrodisiac qualities of the produce, or are healed by the sweetness of Vianne and her daughter, Reynaud declines this, even though all the time there is nothing he wants more. This is supposed to be a movie about love, and, just at the point where you're beginning to wish that someone would do something for the woman who does all the doing for everybody else (another cliche of the genre), Johnny Depp, as the gipsy Roux, comes sailing up the river with his guitar. Reynaud is smart enough to hate him as well, but Vianne is interested, and soon she is feeding him truffles under a starry sky.

Chocolat has been nominated for a clutch of Oscars, of course, including best picture, and will be considered extremely charming by many. But I venture that there is nothing more charming than the truly inventive, and nothing more shallow than the rehashing - or Miramaxing - of trite cinema formulas to gain an approach on movie-going affections. Mind your tummies: this week's big movie is a cynical confection too sweet to be wholesome.

Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this article which appeared in the Electronic Telegraph (UK) on March 2, 2001.

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