CHOCOLAT A
France Germany Cameroon (105 mi) 1988 d: Claire Denis
France Germany Cameroon (105 mi) 1988 d: Claire Denis
When I was making
Chocolat I think I had the desire to express a certain guilt I felt as a child
raised in a colonial world […] knowing I was white, I tried to be honest in
admitting that Chocolat is essentially a white view of the Other.
—Claire Denis
When you look at the
hills, beyond the houses and beyond the trees, where the earth touches the sky,
that’s the horizon. The closer you get to that line, the father it moves. If
you walk towards it, it moves away. It flees from you. I must also explain this
to you. You see the line. You see it, but it doesn’t exist. —Marc Dalens (François Cluzet)
The daughter of a civil servant, Denis spent much of her
childhood in different colonial French West African countries in the 1950’s, living
in what is now Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal, and Cameroon before returning to
France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev,
Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing
her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature who
never wrote a novel until her 40’s, she brings an unconventional maturity into
her works. She's one of the unsung
filmmakers of our era, a director who moves between an experimental, avant-garde
style with slight to nonexistent narratives to more conventional narratives
fairly easily, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized
characters usually absent from mainstream cinema (immigrants, exiles, alienated
individuals, sexual transgressives), and while rarely calling attention to her
impeccable craftsmanship, Denis has a highly individualistic aesthetic that
favors poetic texture and visualized style over dialogue and action. Often resorting to fractured time frames, she
often blurs the lines between dreams and reality, the past and the present,
where memory evokes painful references to history, which she uses to question
the ingrained prejudices of the dominant white European culture and its
supposed myth of civilization and progress.
The film is largely a memory piece that has an aching rawness to it as a
young woman in her 20’s named France (Mireille Perrier) returns to the African region
where she grew up during her childhood, a nation that has since gained its
independence, but her reflections recall when it was under French colonialist
control during her childhood in the 50’s.
A near hypnotic experience, the film stuns by its ability to express with
such banality how easily it is to mistreat an entire nation of citizens, as
people are seen as less than human, where the colonialist mentality sees
Africans as incapable of being anything other than servile domestics, overly
submissive servants that wait on the French hand and foot, mostly living in
dire poverty themselves which the French ignore while living their own lives of
luxury and ease.
France (Cécile Ducasse) is a young white girl living in a
remote colonial outpost in Cameroon, where the French flag is raised to the
sound of trumpets each day, as she is raised separately from all the other
black children in the village. She is a
child of wealth and privilege, where African servants dutifully obey her
family’s every wish from the time they wake up in the morning until they’re
safely asleep. Her father, Marc Dalens
(François Cluzet), is the regional administrator who is always away on
important business adventures, where it’s his job to resolve petty tribal disputes
while also keeping an eye open for the future, while her extraordinarily beautiful
mother Aimée (Giulia Boschi) stays at home and lives a life of bourgeois refinement,
usually arguing with the cook as the meals aren’t French enough, but always
well looked after by the house servant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), a regular
fixture in the home, always curteous, whose tall and muscular frame cuts a
handsome and imposing figure, and while he’s a man of intelligence and great
dignity, his soft-spoken manner and quiet reserve express a certain
nobility. Much of the director’s
interest lies in what’s never spoken, in the silences that exist between
characters, frequently leaving out explanatory information, leaving the viewer
to superimpose their own thoughts about what the characters might be
thinking. Protée is usually France’s
only friend, where she often runs off with him as he attends to errands,
growing impatient if he overextends his stay, reminding him that her mother is
expecting him. And while the film is
seen through France’s eyes, both as a young woman and as a child, it’s more about
her recollections of Protée, whose continual acts of kindness are never
reciprocated. Perhaps the singlemost allure
of the film is Abdullah Ibrahim’s fascinating musical score, offering a mix of
sophisticated European jazz with a raw African flavor, almost always used
during long tracking shots of the nearby landscape, beautifully shot by Robert
Alazraki, with Agnès Godard as the actual camera operator, where the
countryside itself becomes a silent character in the film. It’s the exotic feeling of “otherness” that
punctuates the music with sublime textures of faraway lands.
A single event disrupts the mirage of harmony, when a plane
is forced to land nearby, where they are forced to wait for weeks to get a
needed part for repair. During this
interlude, the French passengers reveal their true colors, at first grateful
for the lavish hospitality, but soon become bored and with nothing else to do but turn
on the African help with an onslaught of racist invectives that are meant to be
demeaning and hurtfully cruel, where one in particular, a spoiled young ingrate
named Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), intentionally tries to penetrate through the passive
reserve of Protée, continually mocking him, hoping he will break
character. This kind of sick amusement
only exposes the racist attitudes about Africans back home in France, but also
unleashes unspoken sexual desires, as Protée’s solemn presence attracts the
desire of Aimée, especially with her husband away so much of the time. This contrast of demeaning humiliation with
idealized sexuality expresses with equal measure the arrogance and pure
ignorance of the colonial rulers, who have no respect or any knowledge
whatsoever of the African people or culture.
Africans are routinely seen grooming one another in the afternoon sun,
or we hear the sound of children at play, while the French hide indoors,
seeking refuge in the shade, often hiding behind dark sunglasses, drinking
themselves into a stupor. Africans must
bathe in the “Boys shower,” an open air outdoor facility in full view of the
main house, where even their privacy is on full display. Despite this nakedness, it’s ironic how
little is known of the world of Africans, who are rarely seen and are given
minimal dialogue, continually reinforcing the white perspective. It is only in the relationship between Protée
and young France that we see evidence of any developing complexity, a
relationship that is abruptly challenged when Protée rejects Aimée’s sexual advances
and she has him quickly banished from the house, an act that has lifelong
consequences for young France as well. The
film is a stark reminder of human contradictions, with so many thoughts left
unspoken, every gesture ambiguous. Ultimately
the film explores the parameters between ourselves and the mysterious Other,
where the camera intrudes across various boundaries of the body, the spirit, and
the mind, but also borders and culture, often unwillingly asking us to look at
what moral lines are being crossed. The
silence of Protée is symptomatic of Denis’s sensitivity, as we know little
about his character, and can only guess his motivations. Rather than offering an understanding of the
Other, it remains an open question where we are left to determine its meaning
and value for ourselves.
