Merci pour le chocolat

After seeing this film, I wanted to rush to read the Charlotte Armstrong novel The Chocolate Cobweb, not because I was wowed by the source material but rather to try and fathom what on earth she was trying for. Perhaps the fault can be blamed on the adaptation by Caroline Eliacheff and director Claude Chabrol. It's hard to know but what is certain is that this treatment poses more questions than it answers. Mysteries can be fun without having all the motivations explained, since human behaviour is often inexplicable, but here I found I had the same response as in Chabrol's La Ceremonie when Jacqueline Bisset's family are blown away - shock and disbelief. The plot contrivance that leads Anna Mouglalis to the house of Isabelle Huppert and Jacques Dutronc is as tenuous as a spider's web. One hears it and thinks, this can't be all there is?! And whilst Huppert supplies some intriguing duplicitious body language - note the movement of her legs as subtext in the scene where she visits Mouglalis' mother - there is more suggested than actually revealed. It also reminded me of the non-end to Chabrol's L'Enfer, where he dared not provide a conclusion to the unfinished screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Chabrol's camera occasionally pans past Huppert to make observations, and the edit from a photo of Dutronc's first wife whom Mouglalis resembles (the actress plays her in flashback) to Mouglalis listening to music, her hands covering her face in the identical pose, is amusing. But the climactic revelation at the end has no weight, as arbitrary as Huppert's movement from sitting enveloped by her web-patterned lacework, to a long one take closeup where she cries, to folding into a foetal position. The titular chocolate is a red herring, but I was more disappointed that the implication of incest with her son had no basis. Perhaps one's inclination to project onto the narrative is an indication of it's lack of focus. Mouglalis conveys a strong screen presence, and perhaps because Huppert and Chabrol have worked together to great effect before, one's expectations of her contribution in his films is high. But I can't feel I can criticise Huppert. She seems keyed to do something that the screenplay never brings to fruition. Hoping that a second viewing will make the filmmakers objectives clearer is never a good sign.

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.

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.

In Lausanne, the aspirant pianist Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis) has lunch with her mother Louise Pollet (Brigitte Catillon), her boyfriend Axel (Mathieu Simonet) and his mother. Jeanne leans that when she was born, a nurse had mistakenly told to the prominent pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) that she would be his daughter. André has just remarried his first wife, the heiress of a Swiss chocolate factory Marie-Claire "Mika" Muller (Isabelle Huppert), and they live in Lausanne with André's second marriage son Guillaume Polonski (Rodolphe Pauly). Out of the blue, Jeanne visits André and he offers to give piano classes to help her in her examination. Jeanne becomes closer to André and visits him every day; soon she discovers that Mika might be drugging her stepson with Rohypnol. Further, she might have killed André's second wife Lisbeth.

"Merci pour le Chocolat" is another ambiguous film by Claude Chabrol about evilness, alienation and manipulation. Isabelle Huppert, who is one of Chabrol's favorite's actresses, performs a wicked lady. The essence of her evil is not explained, but she is capable to drug and kill her best friend and incapable to love or donate to help children. Jeanne Pollet is manipulative and greedy, and uses the incident in the maternity hospital to get closer to André. When she sees the photo of Lisbeth in the bedroom, she returns to the pianos room where André is and puts her hands on her face exactly the same way Lisbeth did. André Polonski is alienated and lives his life in the world of music, and doping to sleep and ignoring to see what Mika did to Lisbeth. They live a hypocrite life with Guillaume, who does not have any objective in life. This film is not among the best works of Claude Chabrol, but anyway it is entertaining. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Teia de Chocolate" ("The Chocolate Cobweb")

Note: On 12 January 2025, I saw this film again.

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.