Chocolat

Set in the Cameroons in West Africa in the 1950s, Claire Denis' Chocolat is a beautifully photographed and emotionally resonant tone poem that depicts the effects of a dying colonialism on a young family during the last years of French rule. The theme is similar to the recent Nowhere in Africa, though the films are vastly different in scope and emphasis. The film is told from the perspective of an adult returning to her childhood home in a foreign country. France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), a young woman traveling through Cameroon, recalls her childhood when her father (Francois Cluzet) was a government official in the French Cameroons and she had a loving friendship with the brooding manservant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé). The heart of the film, however, revolves around France's mother Aimée (Giulia Boschi) and her love/hate relationship with Protée that is seething with unspoken sexual tension.

The household is divided into public and private spaces. The white families rooms are private and off limits to all except Protée who works in the house while the servants are forced to eat and shower outdoors, exposing their naked bronze bodies to the white family's gazes. It becomes clear when her husband Marc (François Cluzet) goes away on business that Aimée and Protée are sexually attracted to each other but the rules of society prevent it from being openly acknowledged. In one telling sequence, she invites him into her bedroom to help her put on her dress and the two stare at each other's image in the mirror with a defiant longing in their eyes, knowing that any interaction is taboo.

The young France (Cecile Ducasse) also forms a bond with the manservant, feeding him from her plate while he shows her how to eat crushed ants and carries her on his shoulders in walks beneath the nocturnal sky. In spite of their bond, the true nature of their master-servant relationship is apparent when France commands Protée to interrupt his conversation with a teacher and immediately take her home, and when Protée stands beside her at the dinner table, waiting for her next command. When a plane loses its propeller and is forced to land in the nearby mountains, the crew and passengers must move into the compound until a replacement part can be located. Each visitor shows their disdain for the Africans, one, a wealthy owner of a coffee plantation brings leftover food from the kitchen to his black mistress hiding in his room. Another, Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), an arrogant white Frenchman, upsets the racial balance when he uses the outside shower, eats with the servants, and taunts Aimée about her attraction to Protée leading her to a final emotional confrontation with the manservant.

Chocolat is loosely autobiographical, adapted from the childhood memories of the director, and is slowly paced and as mysterious as the brooding isolation of the land on which it is filmed. Denis makes her point about the effects of colonialism without preaching or romanticizing the characters. There are no victims or oppressors, no simplistic good guys. Protée is a servant but he is also a protector as when he stands guard over the bed where Aimée and her daughter sleep to protect them from a rampaging hyena. It is a sad fact that Protée is treated as a boy and not as a man, but Bankolé imbues his character with such dignity and stature that it lessens the pain. Because of its pace, Western audiences may have to work hard to fully appreciate the film and Denis does not, in Roger Ebert's phrase, "coach our emotions". The truth of Chocolat lies in the gestures and glances that touch the silent longing of our heart.

In reflecting on this movie I can think of two others to help put it in perspective. One relatively forgettable but covering the same geography, is Coup de Torchon, the other thousands of miles away and much larger in scope is the unforgettable Indochine. Claire Denis has produced a movie that has some of the grand underpinnings of Indochine, the complex and unspoken relationship between France and her colonial subjects.

I was struck with the dignity of Potee, with his struggle to maintain his dignity among his peers and with his white bosses. I was also struck with the love/hate relationship between him and Aimee. It is the latter that gives the film its driving force, it is the latter that links this movie to Indochine.

One never is sure what motivates everyone, though some of the characters are required of a remembrance of colonialism. It is this cynical side of the story that ties it to Coup de Torchon. Theirs is the more scandalous story, perhaps even more interesting in a depraved way, but Denis gives us a remembrance of how it was with all the tension and unresolved relationships.

The American black who gives the grown up France a ride in the beginning and end of the movie offers yet another interesting side to the confusion that we in the Western world have when we look at Africa. He says that when he came he wanted to call everyone brother. He was coming home, but they just thought him to be a little daft. France, the character and the girl, grew up in Cameroon, but neither fully understands what it is even though they can remember how it was.

A lovely comedy-drama that seems like a gorgeous, sunlit, Orientalist-like tourism into an unfathomable Africa, and an elaborate, irrelevant exercise in Merchant-Ivory-style historical reconstruction, but is actually a quietly disturbing examination of the effects of colonialism. Being French, the focus is one the microcosmic - it's not vast historical truths that are enacted, but the inability of a beautiful white woman to act on sexual stirrings for her black servant. The film's surface elegance conceals remarkable disruptions in point of view and a storytelling style so elliptical you might even miss the point if you're not careful. CHOCOLAT is also a wonderful coming-of-age film that refuses the easy moral progress typical of the genre. The lengthy coda could have been shorter, though.

Unfortunately, because of US viewers' tendency to shun subtitles, this movie has not received the distribution nor attention it merits. Its subtle themes of belonging, identity, racial relations and especially how colonialism harms all parties, transcend the obvious dramatic tensions, the nostalgic memories of the protaganiste's childhood, and the exoticism of her relationship with her parents' "houseboy," perhaps the only "real" human she knows. We won't even look at her mother's relationship with this elegant man. There! i hope i've given you enough of a hook to take it in, whether you speak French or like subtitles or not. I challenge you to be as brave, strong and aware as La P'tite.

Despite needing something more for me in its wrap-up, Claire Denis' Chocolat is in all ways a really good look into Cameroon and France's colonial history. Unlike the case of some films made in the US, it doesn't hammer the audience with a message about white people's ugliness, instead it just carefully shows them, and sort of leaves the audience the responsibility to observe and be horrified. It's amazing how a narrative like this with a white lead is so carefully handled that it doesn't make excuses for that privilege, and doesn't paint her as an exception or, a favorite Hollywood trope, the white savior. Isaach De Bankolé is also key here. When his character cracks it's not obvious why he does, but it's in the little expressions and reactions to the things he hears and witnesses that should explain it.