Chocolat is a 1988 French period drama film, written and directed by Claire Denis in her directorial debut. It follows a young girl who lives with her family in French Cameroon. Marc and Aimée Dalens (François Cluzet and Giulia Boschi) play the parents of protagonist France (Cécile Ducasse), who befriends Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), a Cameroonian who is the family's household servant.
Chocolat was entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. The film was critically received with largely positive notice.
Contents
Plot
An adult woman named France walks down a road toward Douala in Cameroon. She is picked up by William J. Park, an African American who has moved to Africa and is driving to Limbe with his son. As they ride, France's mind drifts and we see her as a young girl in Mindif in the northern part of French Cameroon in 1957, where her father was a colonial administrator for the French Empire.
The story is told through the eyes of young France, showing her friendship with the "houseboy," Protée, as well as the sexual tension between Protée and her ‘‘easy-going’’ mother, Aimée. The conflict of the film comes from the discomfort created as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans. This is brought to a head through Luc Segalen, a Western drifter who stays with the Dalens family after a small aircraft crashes nearby. He acknowledges Aimée's attraction to Protée in the presence of other black servants. This later results in a fight between Luc and Protée, which Protée wins. During the fight, Aimée sits nearby, unseen by the two. She attempts to seduce Protée after Luc has left but he rejects her advance. Aimée consequently asks her husband to remove him from the house. Protée is moved from his in-house job to working outdoors in the garage as a mechanic.
Towards the end of the film, France's father reveals a central theme of the film as he explains to her what the horizon is. He tells her that it is a line that is there but not there, a symbol for the boundaries that exist in the country between rich and poor, master and servant, white and black, coloniser and colonised, male and female; a line that is always visible but impossible to approach or pass.
Cast
Isaach de Bankolé as Protée
Giulia Boschi as Aimée Dalens
François Cluzet as Marc Dalens
Cécile Ducasse as France Dalens, as a girl
Mireille Perrier as France Dalens, as a woman
Jean-Claude Adelin as Luc
Laurent Arnal as Machinard
Jean Bediebe as Prosper
Didier Flamand as Captain Védrine
Jean-Quentin Châtelain as Courbassol
Emmanuelle Chaulet as Mireille Machinard
Kenneth Cranham as Jonathan Boothby
Jacques Denis as Joseph Delpich
Clementine Essono as Marie-Jeanne
Essindi Mindja as Blaise
Soundtrack
The soundtrack, performed and recorded by Abdullah Ibrahim, was released in 1988 as Mindif.
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 71% of 14 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.1/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 81 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
