What's that saying about Freud and chocolate? I don't think there is one. Unfortunately, the eager director of "Chocolat," Lasse Hallstrom, sublimates the clich from his repressed memories as a latter-day Charlie, and so "satisfies" his audience with a sickly-sweet fairy tale of caring, redemption and that eternal decision between Mounds and Almond Joy.
From the first caramel bite we get a Wonkaesque morality tale: Vianne (Juliette Binoche) and her well-cast daughter, Anouk (Victoire Thivisol) drift on a north wind, hooded in red capes, into a French hill town, circa 1959, that is more of an illustration than a place people actually live.
Their history: setting up shop in the major European cities, then getting shoved out before the bon bons might melt in their hands.
Their mission: to open a "chocolaterie" (that's French for chocolate shop) here so as to melt the bittersweet hearts of les paysans et le Comte alike. Maybe they'd like to settle down for a while, too.
Their lesson: live a little, mes amis, and wake up to the panacea that is processed cacao.
Chocolate as aphrodisiac, chocolate as social lubricant, chocolate as assisted suicide, chocolate as heart-warming gift, chocolate as devil incarnate; ah, that pearly brown tonic, the after-dinner mint of the gods, a woman's second-best friend, the sweet tooth's red wine -- let us rejoice to the sound of chocolate by pronouncing the word with half its consonants missing!
But let us not spoil our dinner. Binoche's uninvited entrance riles up this tremendously square, 1950s town, its mayor and its tranquilit (that's French for tranquility).
Just as when, two-thirds through the film, a band of river rat hoodlums, led by Roux (Johnny Depp), are assaulted with "Boycott Immorality" broadsides, Binoche is accused of being "some kind of radical." Left of Martha Stewart, perhaps.
Her first customer, the snide turned fun-loving Armande (Judi Dench), wisely describes the style of her lavishly accoutered boutique as a "Mexican brothel."
Not all are convinced, however, that the Hersheification of their village is the best possible thing. The mayor and the new pastor, who is so uninspired he cannot write a sermon without the mayor's oversight, seem to have lived on hardtack or liver and onions for the past two centuries.
For those "qui ne voudrait pas quelque chose sucr," whose puritanical comport makes them see more than literary parallels between chocolate and temptation (it is actually one of the greatest weaknesses in both the screenplay, based on a book by Joanne Harris, and the directing that these parallels are so blatant and unrealistic), all these tasty flavors of chocolate antagonize the healthy homogeny and conservativism of their village. The god-fearing townfolk use the phrase "sinfully decadent" in its original sense.
As the film progresses -- like syrup in some places, like a solid five-pound bar in others -- Hallstrom frames the town's turmoil as confessional versus confectional.
The film tries, and rather fails, to be like the glorious Danish piece, "Babbette's Feast," or maybe less profoundly, "Like Water For Chocolate."
The food imagery was not even luscious. Everyone spoke English, with a barely feigned French affectation (worse than the cartoon version of Madeleine). The film tried to be Euro-exotic without being either, and portrayed those who don't care much for treats as fundamentalists.
The subplot involving Dench and her grandfils (who engages in an eerily "American Beauty"-like scene halfway through), and the one about the outcast woman who finds sanctity in the bakery, work well enough.
Overall, though, the characters are as complex and subtle as the colors on M&Ms. And, except when a young dark-eyed girl says, regarding Depp, "He's not my daddy -- he's my pony," the film is not funny.
"I felt a new sensation," says the Comte after a cathartic chocolate experience, "-- freedom." Or was it indigestion?
