Set in the Cameroons
in West Africa in the 1950s, Claire Denis' Chocolat is a beautifully
photographed and emotionally resonant tone poem that depicts the effects
of a dying colonialism on a young family during the last years of French
rule. The theme is similar to the recent Nowhere in Africa, though
the films are vastly different in scope and emphasis. The film is told
from the perspective of an adult returning to her childhood home in a foreign
country. France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), a young woman traveling through
Cameroon, recalls her childhood when her father (Francois Cluzet) was a
government official in the French Cameroons and she had a loving friendship
with the brooding manservant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé).
The heart of the film, however, revolves around France's mother Aimée
(Giulia Boschi) and her love/hate relationship with Protée that
is seething with unspoken sexual tension.
The household is divided
into public and private spaces. The white families rooms are private and
off limits to all except Protée who works in the house while the
servants are forced to eat and shower outdoors, exposing their naked bronze
bodies to the white family's gazes. It becomes clear when her husband Marc
(François Cluzet) goes away on business that Aimée and Protée
are sexually attracted to each other but the rules of society prevent it
from being openly acknowledged. In one telling sequence, she invites him
into her bedroom to help her put on her dress and the two stare at each
other's image in the mirror with a defiant longing in their eyes, knowing
that any interaction is taboo.
The young France (Cecile
Ducasse) also forms a bond with the manservant, feeding him from her plate
while he shows her how to eat crushed ants and carries her on his shoulders
in walks beneath the nocturnal sky. In spite of their bond, the true nature
of their master-servant relationship is apparent when France commands Protée
to interrupt his conversation with a teacher and immediately take her home,
and when Protée stands beside her at the dinner table, waiting for
her next command. When a plane loses its propeller and is forced to land
in the nearby mountains, the crew and passengers must move into the compound
until a replacement part can be located. Each visitor shows their disdain
for the Africans, one, a wealthy owner of a coffee plantation brings leftover
food from the kitchen to his black mistress hiding in his room. Another,
Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin), an arrogant white Frenchman, upsets the racial
balance when he uses the outside shower, eats with the servants, and taunts
Aimée about her attraction to Protée leading her to a final
emotional confrontation with the manservant.
Chocolat is loosely
autobiographical, adapted from the childhood memories of the director,
and is slowly paced and as mysterious as the brooding isolation of the
land on which it is filmed. Denis makes her point about the effects of
colonialism without preaching or romanticizing the characters. There are
no victims or oppressors, no simplistic good guys. Protée is a servant
but he is also a protector as when he stands guard over the bed where Aimée
and her daughter sleep to protect them from a rampaging hyena. It is a
sad fact that Protée is treated as a boy and not as a man, but Bankolé
imbues his character with such dignity and stature that it lessens the
pain. Because of its pace, Western audiences may have to work hard to fully
appreciate the film and Denis does not, in Roger Ebert's phrase, "coach
our emotions". The truth of Chocolat lies in the gestures and glances
that touch the silent longing of our heart.