Vanille

During one of the free preview weekends, I recorded Chocolat onto the DVR. It's going to be on tomorrow at 2:45 AM on HBO Family (three hours later if you only have the west coast feed), and again on Friday on HBO 2.

Juliette Binoche plays Vianne, a woman with a young daughter Anouk. The two come to a small town in late-1950s France, and Vianne decides that she's going to settle down for a while. There's an empty storefront across from the church, so Vianne finds the owner Amande (Judi Dench) and asks to rent the store and the apartment above. Amande's plan is to open up a chocolaterie, with homemade fine chocolates. Now, frankly, I found myself wondering how such a business could survive in such a small village considering the prices and that it's not much of a market.

But economics aren't Vianne's problem; instead, she faces cultural difficulties. She had the great bad sense to decide to open the place right at the start of Lent, and as the movie is set before Vatican II, there's still a fair amount of religiosity in parts of France. This particular village is also one of the more conservative villages out there, having been led by the Comte (Alfred Molina), who is the mayor and bosses everybody around, especially the local priest, as well as dullard Serge (Peter Stormare). Serge is a brute too, in that he bets his wife Josephine (Lena Olin).

The sudden presence of a bohemian naturally brings a change to the village; otherwise, we wouldn't have a movie, would we. Amande is the first to warm to Vianne. She turns out to be diabetic and probably dying. She's always been a bit more of a free spirit, enough to attract her grandson to her and the shop too despite the wishes of the boy's mother. There's also Josephine, who decides to run away from Serge and go to Vianne to become Vianne's apprentice.

Still, the Comte doesn't like Vianne's store, and it's about to get worse for Vianne. Into town comes a group of itinerants who travel by boat, doing some sort of labor that apparently pays for their lifestyle. One of them is Roux (Johnny Depp), who offers to fix Vianne's doors. They fall in love pretty quickly, and that really pisses off the Comte for some reason. Disaster happens, and it's nearly enough to make Vianne leave town....

Chocolat is a movie that got a lot of praise when it was released, and it's one that made me think of a couple of other movies. Unfortunately, they were unfavorable comparisons. The first was Antonia's Line, another movie about a quirky postwar village. But where that one was mostly fun, Chocolat felt like it was trying to hit me over the head even more with Vianne's quirkiness and how it makes everybody change. The movie probably should have been more of a light comedy than a drama with some comedy.

The other movie was Darkest Hour, a movie where I had serious problems with the intrusive camera movement. I noticed a fair amount of similar camerawork here, especially when there were establishing shots. One other problem I felt was in continuity, although that's probably going to be less of a problem for other people. The movie is supposed to be set between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but a fair amount of the movie happens in an outdoors that seems much too warm for the season, even if this is southwest France.

Still, the performances are fairly good, and the movie did get a lot of praise from everybody else, so most of you will probably like it more than I did. It seems to be out of print on DVD, but if you don't have the premium channels, you can also watch it on Amazon streaming.