Anglo-French writer Joanne Harris’s lovely novel Chocolat attracted much praise and has been something of a bestseller; now it has been made into a film by director Lasse Hallström (responsible for last year’s The Cider House Rules) and scriptwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs.
Beginning resonantly with “Once upon a time …”, the film establishes itself at once as a kind of fable. And a very charming fable it is. EM Forster made the distinction between rounded characters and flat characters in novels, and one can make a similar distinction when it comes to movies. In Chocolat, the characters aren’t exactly rounded, but, as Forster says of Dickens’s people, they may be flat but they vibrate very energetically.
Juliette Binoche, who has the right kind of half-smile perpetually playing about her lips, is Vianne Rocher, a mysterious woman who one day arrives in a small French village along with her daughter, Anouk (Victoire Thivisol). It is a “sly wind … from the north” that blows them into town, and they arrive amid its winter greyness in red-hooded cloaks, like creatures from a fairytale.
Colour is important early on in the movie, when VianneÃ-s difference is signalled simply and effectively by the vibrant reds and turquoises she wears and with which she surrounds herself. She takes over an old bakery and turns it into a chocolaterie, where she conjures up wickedly delicious confections and thereby sets off events that will upset the rather stuffy tranquillité of the village.
That tranquillité is husbanded mostly by the mayor, the Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), who finds in the chocolaterie – and in Vianne’s witchy ability to see what others need and want – a threat to social propriety and stability. The fact that she opens her shop at the start of Lent, a period of abstinence and penitence, is a challenge to the orderly progress of life as regula-ted by the Catholic Church, through whose naive young priest the mayor speaks.
Here, the film departs from the novel, where the priest himself is Vianne’s chief enemy, and the conflict is more directly between church and chocolaterie. While this displacement does not weaken the story, or make the film less enjoyable, it removes some of what gives the novel substance and thematic texture: the battle of Christianity to suppress the older, pagan traditions it has sought to consume and revalue.
Vianne’s Easter chocolate festival alludes to the fact that beneath the passion of Christ lie the myths of the fertility gods and goddesses who embody the cycle of birth, death and rebirth that is the turning of the earth in its seasons, the rhythm of life itself.
This richness is lost in the film (were the makers trying to avoid offending Catholics?), and it does seem at times, for all its warmth, to lack the ballast such themes would have provided. Also lost are some of the implications of the arrival of the gypsies, cause of more conflict between Vianne and the mayor. In the novel, the gypsies – the “river rats” – have an Arab or two among them, and the righteous villagers’ contempt for and fear of them clearly echoes the racism and xenophobia still harboured by some Europeans toward immigrants and, of course, the real gyspies yet in their midst. (This is the south of France, after all, bastion of the now somewhat faded right-wing demagogue Jean-Marie le Pen.)
The river people are led by Roux, played by Johnny Depp, who, to my mind, gives an annoyingly smug performance. It’s as though he’s acting out some fantasy role in which he has long yearned to see himself – a kind of guitar-playing beatnik wanderer embodying seductive exoticism, all dark eyes and sun-streaked hair. It is hard to find him very threatening, as the villagers are supposed to do, and why he has some version of an Irish accent is impossible to discern.
But Depp is not the movie’s centre, for all his casual star-power. Binoche carries it with grace, assisted by a great ensemble that
includes Dame Judi Dench, magificient as the eccentric widow Armande, and Lena Olin as a scarred woman who finds strength in Vianne’s presence. John Wood, a theatrical Brit like Dench, is perfect in a small part.
Some kind of foodstuff-based metaphor is inevitable (I’ve been holding them at bay for paragraphs), so let me now say that Chocolat may not be the fullest possible meal of a movie – certainly, no stewy gristle – but it has a very enticing flavour, as well as an obscurely comforting taste.