Film critics aren't usually folk with a sweet tooth so much as a sharp one.
I suspect, therefore, some audiences will like Lasse Hallstrom's soft-centred Chocolat better than I did. The kind of audience, for instance, that loved the sugary Cinema Paradiso or the fragrant Tea with Mussolini: both predigested exercises in genteel nostalgia.
So, too, is this pseudo-French fable, made in England, about the arrival of a mysterious confectioner (Juliette Binoche dressed in chic witch cloak and hood) in a Gallic hamlet whose uptight inhabitants she improves into warm human beings by virtue of her tempting chocolates. Its simplistic fairy-tale feel makes Hallstrom's last hit, The Cider House Rules, look like an austere industrial documentary.
Besides Binoche, whose pagan pots and pans promise more transgressive revelry than her sweetmeats actually deliver, the place includes a pious zealot (Alfred Molina), an abused wife (Lena Olin), a winsome priest (Hugh O'Connor), a grumpy granny (Judi Dench) with an estranged daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss) and various picturesque old dodderers (John Wood, Leslie Caron), all of whom are turned into chocoholics and models of tolerance once they get the flavour of the aphrodisiac cocoa bean on their tongues.
In Joanne Harris's novel, the villain was the Catholic priest who laid down the law of postponed gratification from the pulpit. The film neuters the prelate and makes Molina's aristocrat the spoilsport, and thus secularises the story to its disadvantage; Binoche's semi-mystical sweetmeats no longer compete with communion wafers in tongue-to-tongue dialectic. But then the Miramax tycoons, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who produced Chocolat, have recently been investing large chunks of their American coin in film-making in Italy, and certainly aren't going to risk the Vatican's disapproval by turning chocolate lovers against the Church.
The natural comparison is with Babette's Feast, another film in which a stranger serves a banquet to a religiously repressed community and sets their secular juices running. But in Gabriel Axel's 1987 film, food itself becomes a sort of transfigured sacrament; in Chocolat, it simply remains bon-bons. The assortment of accents issuing from the English-speaking characters must make this village an unexpectedly cosmopolitan corner of France. None sounds more displaced than that of Johnny Depp, who plays an Irish gipsy and looks as if he's just strolled over from the set of Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried, in which he played a Hungarian gipsy. Sad to see this nomadic player wasting his talents in a succession of small parts of no account.
Chocolate - Deep Dark Secrets
Cert: cert12A
