Chocolat (1989)

I think this movie would be more enjoyable if everyone thought of it as a picture of colonial Africa in the 50's and 60's rather than as a story. Because there is no real story here. Just one vignette on top of another like little points of light that don't mean much until you have enough to paint a picture. The first time I saw Chocolat I didn't really "get it" until having thought about it for a few days. Then I realized there were lots of things to "get", including the end of colonialism which was but around the corner, just no plot. Anyway, it's one of my all-time favorite movies. The scene at the airport with the brief shower and beautiful music was sheer poetry. If you like "exciting" movies, don't watch this--you'll be bored to tears. But, for some of you..., you can thank me later for recommending it to you.

To whom it may concern:After having read a few reviews and just seen the film, these are my thoughts. I agree that the film portrays and plays off of the white/black dynamic, but to be more precise, I think that it reinforces the exotification of black and African men by white women. Protee is definitely a stoic character in the movie, but to say that that makes the movie good is not necessarily justification enough for me. Rather, I was more concerned than anything that at the end of the movie I was so moved by a production that in retrospect perpetuates stereotypes about the black/white dynamic and does little, if anything, to empower any of the black characters. Basically, I feel like it only romanticizes the the relationship of Aimee and Protee thereby giving implicit acceptance to the power dynamic inherent between the two of them. As I said earlier, however, it did "move me." But as I earlier, it was the production; the acting, rather than the story itself, that moved me, and to confuse these two is what concerned me most. I'm sure there are a lot of "well-meaning" people out there who liked this movie, and it does have good acting, but all I have to say is switch the characters around-make Aimee the character in a position of less power and give that power to Protee and all of a sudden it's going to be a much less acceptable, interesting, and realistic to a lot of people. It's a good story, apparently semi-autobiographical, but skews the race picture much to the satisfaction of the privileged folks who are paying to see it.

I don't know what the previous reviewer was watching but I guess that's what reviews are, personal taste. Missed in this movie was the depth, a very deep film, many layers of emotion, affecting. Undercurrents of withheld love because of submission to societal beliefs, taboos of the times and classes, race relations not being in a very good state of equality, guilt, yearning, hate, confusion, very dark emotionally I thought, under the skin, you have to submit to the aire of it, a flowing movie, not slow as stated before, release yourself to the flow of the film, the emotions will show themselves, characters reveal their flaws, their nasty insides, excellent and actually very cruel!

A lovely comedy-drama that seems like a gorgeous, sunlit, Orientalist-like tourism into an unfathomable Africa, and an elaborate, irrelevant exercise in Merchant-Ivory-style historical reconstruction, but is actually a quietly disturbing examination of the effects of colonialism. Being French, the focus is one the microcosmic - it's not vast historical truths that are enacted, but the inability of a beautiful white woman to act on sexual stirrings for her black servant. The film's surface elegance conceals remarkable disruptions in point of view and a storytelling style so elliptical you might even miss the point if you're not careful. CHOCOLAT is also a wonderful coming-of-age film that refuses the easy moral progress typical of the genre. The lengthy coda could have been shorter, though.