Merci pour le chocolat

The performances, particularly that of Isabelle Huppert, are about the only thing to recommend this film. It certainly looks stylish and polished, but if you give one moment's thought to it, you'll realize that not one bit of the plot makes any sense. To top it off, the denouement's arrival comes out of left field, thereby leaving it far from being credible. This film will certainly not be remembered.

Huppert may be a bit difficult to swallow here, as difficult as her chocolate. One marvels that she expects others to love and trust her, and that most do. Such marvelous manners! Is that all it takes? But the film turns on her carefully mannered performance and Chabrol's ever present laughter at it. He places sane, emotionally healthy family against its opposite. Phantom daughter Jeanne's home seems all window, always sunlit, while Mika's (Huppert) is a labyrinth, windows downplayed. People make little journeys to a bedroom, to a music room. How on earth does Jeanne come so early to the conclusion she does about Mica's chocolate? The answer is simply that she comes from the sane side of the dichotomy, yet concluding what she does, right or not no matter, is un-sane. Barging in, as she does, in the first place is less than sane. Yet she's a perfect foil for Huppert.

The piano lessons are wonderful, almost reason alone for seeing the film. If you sit through the closing credits, you'll get to see what Huppert's been knitting.

BEWARE: These comments give away crucial elements of the plot!!! Don't read these comments unless you've seen the movie!!!

Even though I don't find the movie works well as a thriller, I am glad I watched it. Here is why:

Assume that your behavior is determined by your nature, i.e. by the genes that have been passed down to you from your parents. Is it then still possible to hold someone responsible for what he or she is doing? In other words: Why do things happen the way they happen? This is IMHO the fundamental question that Claude Chabrol asks in his latest movie Sweet Poison.

From very early on in the movie the alignment of characters is fairly obvious: A couple consisting of a femme fatale and a detached pianist, their dull son and as a twin personality the young, alert, and beautiful woman, and her mother, a doctor. Whereas the social relations between these characters are plain: couple, son, daughter, the biological relations between them are highly questionable: the son had been conceived by a woman who later on died in a car-accident; daughter and son might have been swapped on their very first day of life; the doctor conceived her child with the help of an anonymous donator of semen; the femme fatale had been adopted by her parents. This absurd number of ambiguities seems to indicate that this is really the main theme of the movie. The viewer is led to believe that the swapping actually took place and that the daughter has inherited the musical talent from the pianist, while the son inherits the dull unspecificity of his anonymous father.

All four main characters - the couple, son, and daughter - simply live out what has been given to them by nature: the father is a famous pianist, his daughter follows his foot-steps. The femme fatale (symbolically portrayed as a spider) tries to kill the women that get in between herself and the pianist (the mother of the son and the pianist's daughter). The daughter lives an interesting life, which includes playing piano. The son doesn't act at all.

The femme fatale kills the mother of the pianist's son with the help of sweet poison (reflecting the German title: Suesses Gift). When the daughter starts to interfere with the life of the couple, the femme fatale takes the exact same steps (not buying drugs, hurting her son's foot, sending the woman into town to buy drugs, mixing sleeping drugs into the woman's drink) in order to kill the daughter, too. She behaves like a spider that builds a web and immediately starts to build another one when a scientist destroys the web the spider just made: It is a built-in program that's running, not something that the wasp decides to do or not to do. When the pianist finds out about his wife's nature, he doesn't grab her by the throat or accuses her. He just asks her why she did it and then goes on to play piano. This answers the first question: If humans are driven by their nature one cannot hold them responsible for their deeds anymore. Because it is just their nature and they cannot help it.

However, when the femme fatale tries to kill a woman who is close to the pianist the second time around, she fails. Her plan goes the same way as the first time. Whether she succeeds or fails depends on chance, i.e. circumstances that lie beyond her influence, like better car technology. What determines the outcome of things then - the second question - is not human will or drive, but random chance. It is nothing but luck whether things work out or not, if we assume that it is all in our nature/genes.

I mostly went to see "Merci pour le chocolat" because I had never seen a Claude Chabrol movie, so I have no basis of comparison with his other work.

The veddy British subtitles called it "Night Cap" which is much less interesting and resonant of the movie's images than the title of the novel it's based on, "The Chocolate Web," which was written by Charlotte Armstrong, but seems very Ruth Rendellian.

Isabelle Huppert of course is never uninteresting to watch, though this is the second movie in a row where the poor woman had to play a successful, middle-aged career woman with a serious problem, as in "The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste)." Hmm, do the French have a problem with such women, making them so twisted?

The movie starts out like a family saga of family businesses and secrets; I even thought it was going to do for the chocolate industry what "Les Destinees sentimentales" did for the porcelain industry.

But gradually the relationships come together into a mystery that doesn't quite pay off but gives a few horror chills in the process.

(originally written 9/2/2002)

Sometimes a comedic story idea could make for an emotionally engrossing thriller instead. Such is the case with MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT. Chabrol turns what would be a situation comedy plot into a compelling thriller about failed relationships. A respected pianist Andre Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) figures that a maternity ward mishap caused him and his wife, Marie (Isabelle Hubbert) a chocolate manufacturer, to raise the wrong child.

Their college age `son', Guillaume, actually belongs to somebody else. Andre's real child seems to be Jeanne, (Anna Maoglalis) a lovely piano student. Jeanne and her boyfriend, a medical lab intern, are trying to figure out what poison will do some undetected dirty work (Chabrol originally studied to be a pharmacist) Chabrol started his career in the 1950's co-authoring well respected essays on Alfred Hitchcock with fellow countryman and future director Eric Rohmer. Unlike DePalma with his very obvious `Hey, hey look, what Hitchcock film is my scene copied from?' Chabrol wisely keeps his Hitchcock copying to a minimum with subtle Hitchcock styled camera movement. Instead of celebrating `technical innovation', Chabrol uses his camera to keep us gazing at the film's characters.