Chocolat 1988 Full Movie

[Danel Potvin]

Chocolatis a 1988 French period drama film written and directed by Claire Denis (in her directorial debut)[2] that follows a young girl who lives with her family in French Cameroon. Marc and Aime Dalens (Franois Cluzet and Giulia Boschi) play the parents of protagonist France (Ccile Ducasse), who befriends Prote (Isaach de Bankol), a Cameroonian who is the family's household servant.

An adult woman named France walks down a road toward Douala, Cameroon. She is picked up by William J. Park (Emmet Judson Williamson), 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, French Cameroon in 1957, where her father was a colonial administrator.[7]

The story is told through the eyes of young France, showing her friendship with the "houseboy," Prote, as well as the sexual tension between Prote and her mother, Aime. 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 (Jean-Claude Adelin), a Western drifter who stays with the Dalens family after a small aircraft crashes nearby. He acknowledges Aime's attraction to Prote in the presence of other black servants. This later results in a fight between Luc and Prote, which Prote wins. During the fight, Aime sits nearby, unseen by the two. She attempts to seduce Prote after Luc has left but he rejects her advance. Aime consequently asks her husband to remove him from the house. Prote 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.

Of all the places I have visited, Africa is the place where the land exudes the greatest sadness and joy. Outside the great cities, the savanna seems ageless, and in the places where man has built his outposts, he seems to huddle in the center of a limitless space.

The land seems smaller at night than during the day. The horizon draws closer, containing strange rustlings and restlessness and the coughs of wild beasts, and voices carry a great distance - much farther than the lights from the veranda.

"Chocolat" evokes this Africa better than any other film I have ever seen. It knows how quiet the land can be, so that thoughts can almost be heard - and how patient, so that every mistake is paid for sooner or later. The film is set in a French colony in West Africa in the days when colonialism was already doomed, but no one realized it yet. At an isolated outpost of the provincial government, a young girl lives with her father and mother and many Africans, including Protee, the houseboy, who embodies such dignity and intelligence that he confers status upon himself in a society that will allow him none.

The story is told partly through the eyes of the young girl, and the film opens in the present, showing her as an adult in 1988, going back to visit her childhood home. But what is most important about the story are the things the young girl could not have known, or could have understood only imperfectly. And the central fact is that Protee is the best man, the most capable man, in the district, and that her mother and Protee feel a strong sexual attraction to one another.

Protee moves through the compound almost silently, always prompt, always courteous, always tactful. He sees everything. His employer is a French woman in her 30s, attractive, slender, with a few good dresses and the ability to provide a dinner party in West Africa with some of the chic of Paris. She has a workable marriage with her husband, whom she loves after the fashion of a dutiful bourgeoise wife.

Daily life for the young girl is a little lonely, but she shares secrets with Protee, too, and as she moves around the compound she has glimpses of a vast, unknown reality reaching out in all directions from the little patch of alien French society that has been planted there.

One day there is great excitement. An airplane makes an emergency landing in the district, bearing visitors who seem exotic in this quiet place. One of them, young and bold, makes an implied proposition to the French woman. She is not interested, and yet there is a complicated dynamic at work here: She is drawn to Protee, yet cannot have him because of the racist basis of her society. And as is often the case, the master resents the servant, as if prejudice and segregation were the fault of the class that is discriminated against.

It is a movie about the rules and conventions of a racist society and how two intelligent adults, one black, one white, use their mutual sexual attraction as a battleground on which, very subtly, to taunt each other. The woman of course has the power; all of French colonial society stands behind her. But the man has the moral authority, as he demonstrates in the movie's most important scene, which is wordless, brief, and final.

"Chocolat" is one of those rare films with an entirely mature, adult sensibility; it is made with the complexity and subtlety of a great short story, and it assumes an audience that can understand what a strong flow of sex can exist between two people who barely even touch each other. It is a deliberately beautiful film - many of the frames create breathtaking compositions - but it is not a travelogue and it is not a love story. It is about how racism can prevent two people from looking each other straight in the eyes, and how they punish each other for the pain that causes them. This is one of the best films of the year.

Through a close examination of the film's cinematography and mise-en-scne, Hilary Neroni reveals how, in Chocolat, desire is structured "not on the level of the verbal but instead in the field of the visible, which is where the characters' unspoken longings are played out."

Claire Denis' Chocolat (France/West Germany/Cameroon, 1988) begins with France Dalens (Mireille Perrier), a white French woman in her late twenties, returning to Cameroon to revisit her childhood home. On her way, she stops to enjoy an unpopulated beach and ends up obtaining a ride into the city from the only other people on the beach, William "Mungo" Park (Emmet Judson Williamson) and his son. Mungo assumes that France is a French tourist who is "slumming" her way through Africa, but as France stares out the window, the film takes us back to when she was a little girl growing up in a colonial outpost in Cameroon, where her father was a captain in the French army. The rest of the film depicts a particular moment in her childhood that seems to best capture the interracial tensions and conflicts from that time.

The majority of the film relies on the visual rather than the verbal to explain the stresses that exist between France's family, the servants and the family guests. Thus, it falls to the mise-en-scne and the camera placement to clue the audience into what the characters themselves dare not articulate. Not surprisingly, this visual commentary also clues us into larger metaphoric meanings regarding Cameroon, France, colonialism and the politics of desire. Chocolat suggests that we structure desire not on the level of the verbal but instead in the field of the visible, which is where the characters' unspoken longings are played out. In this sense, cinema becomes the privileged vehicle for the representation of colonial power because it can show how the field of the visible articulates power relations and relations of desireand, of course, their intermingled nature.

To begin making this point, Denis and her director of photography Agns Godard create a stunningly beautiful yet isolated portrait of Cameroon. The remote outpost where France's family lives is vast and unpopulated. By placing the story in such an exquisite but lonely area, Denis can concentrate on the intimate relationships existing between a mere handful of characters. Just as these characters are trapped in their remote surroundings, they are also trapped in their roles as wife, servant, child, colonialist and so on. Denis works to highlight this by mapping out the house in terms of racial spaces, which are also demarcated as public or private ones.

The servants are all black Africans, and where they eat, shower, etc, are all public spaces, while the white family's home (especially the bedroom and bathroom) are depicted as private spaces. The public spaces seem constantly on display. Several scenes in particular highlight this and in the process reveal the intensity of the relationship between France's mother Aime (Giulia Boschi), a French woman in her twenties, and Prote (Isaach De Bankol), their Cameroon servant of about the same age. For while the flashback does depict the experience of France as a young girl (Ccile Ducasse), Aime and Prote's relationship is what drives the plot and what shapes France as a young girl and later as an adult.[1]

The scenes between Aime and Prote are often intensely personal, though staged in a completely public space. For example, in one particular scene, Prote is taking a shower. However, the shower for the male servants is outsidein plain view of the house. Denis sets this scene during the day when the colours are rich and the sun is high. We see a medium long shot of Prote soaping himself and then rinsing. Prote and the servants' quarters are in the foreground of the frame, and the big house is in the background. As he is showering, the audience is aware that Aime and France are returning from a walk. As they reach the porch of the house, Prote also catches sight of them, which means that they can see him as well. Upon seeing them, he leans back and stifles a cry as he smashes his elbow against the wall behind him. While not one word is spoken throughout this entire scene, Denis reveals that the very layout of the colonial house with the servants on display is charged with desire. The servants' quarters become a visual field that the colonialist surveys. But this field is also charged with sexual yearning.

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