Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Johnny Depp
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Rating: M
Running time: 121 minutes
Screening: Village, Rialto, Bridgeway.
Review: Peter Calder
Lustrous, charming and hardly original, the new film by the director of My Life As A Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape will seem familiar to those who adored the 1987 Danish Oscar-winner Babette's Feast.
In that film, Stephane Audran - the 70s' Juliette Binoche - used food to awaken the sensibilities of the piously austere inhabitants of a remote village.
The town into which Vianne (Binoche) breezes with her daughter in the late 50s is equally repressed. The mayor (Molina) edits the priest's sermons and keeps an eagle eye out for sensualist excess ("Theirs is the way of slovenly pleasure," he says of a group of newcomers he despises). So when Vianne opens a chocolaterie (in the middle of Lent) and blithely asks the mayor to call her "mademoiselle" even though she has a daughter in tow, she is assured of a hostile response.
It's not hard to see what's coming: Vianne's confections and more particularly her knowledge of each villager's needs and weaknesses allow her to perform a kind of beguiling alchemy, healing the rifts in one fractured family (and fracturing another violent one), restoring passion to a tired marriage, empowering the anciently mourning to rejoice again. The mayor, of course, proves a tougher nut to crack.
There's a heap of class on screen here - the performances (particularly Dench's and Olin's) are uniformly meticulous and observant while Roger Pratt's photography and David Gropman's production design evoke a village life that is a fraction more real than the real thing and in tune with the magic realist tone of the whole undertaking.
But it all seems so slight that you suspect Joanne Harris' source novel, barely 200 pages, might have better sustained a short film. Most characters remain undeveloped - Vianne, for example, gives only an unconvincing glimpse of any interior life and Depp's gypsy-spirited river rat called Roux is a cardboard cutout whose Irish brogue is even more comical than the 'Allo 'Allo accents which pop up elsewhere.
There's plenty of pleasure to be had in what is essentially an arthouse film for people who hate subtitles but, like a box of the sweet and sticky confections which give it its title, it cloys before we reach the end.
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Chocolat
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