IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
MERCI POUR LE CHOCOLAT (THE NIGHTCAP)
Directed by Claude Chabrol
NR 99 minutes In French with subtitles
Claude Chabrol has been making movies since Eisenhower was in the White House and the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. He knows how to make the screen gleam with uneasy, understated menace. He's a disciple of Hitchcock, on whom he co-authored (with Eric Rohmer) a 1957 study before he started his own filmmaking career, and that sanguinary influence has permeated his output, a matter of some fifty-odd films.
"Merci Pour Le Chocolat", which Chabrol calls "a dramatic comedy", is not one of his best. It's an adaptation of The Chocolate Cobweb, a 1948 novel by Charlotte Armstrong. I haven't read the book, but one would hope its plot makes better sense than the one Chabrol and his collaborator, child psychologist Caroline Eliacheff (who also co-scripted his 1995 "La Ceremonie") have brewed here about a serial poisoner with a specialty in hot chocolate. Mika (Isabelle Huppert) has inherited a Swiss chocolate business from her father, and a husband from her best friend Lisbeth, who died tragically when she fell asleep at the wheel some years before. The husband is concert pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc), and Mika actually had him first, in a short-lived marriage a couple of decades back.
Along with the chocolate business, Mika inherited a luxurious if slightly sinister house set high on a scarily winding mountain road above Lake Geneva (the house actually belongs to David Bowie.) She remained on such good terms with Polonski and his second wife that they used to stay with her when they were in Switzerland, and it was on one such visit that Lisbeth had her fatal auto accident, very possibly after having her cognac spiked by Mika.
The issue of inheritance figures large in this story. A young woman named Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) shows up at the house after learning that she was mixed up at birth in the hospital with the Polonskis' son Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly). Jeanne is an aspiring concert pianist, and the suspicion nags at her that Polonski might be her real father. An affinity springs up between them which causes jealousy on the part of Guillaume, who has none of his father's musical talent.
Mika on the other hand seems to take the presence of this intruder well. But she keeps on making her famous hot chocolate ( a secret learned from a Mother Superior) and spiking it with a drug called Rohypnol (known as "the date-rape drug" for its knockout punch,) and serving it up to whomever might get in her way. Jeanne suspects her almost immediately, and keeps an eye peeled for chicanery, while trying to warn Guillaume that he may be a target of this drug-skulduggery. Guillaume dismisses the warning. "Why would she do that?" he protests.
As the plot plunges ahead like a car running out of control down a winding road to a denouement that can be plainly read on signposts along the way, it keeps running over annoying inconsistencies. They can't be divulged here without compounding the annoyance, but they're easily identifiable as the sort that get you mumbling "Why would she do that ....?" and grinding your teeth with frustration.
But Chabrol is such an accomplished stylist that his shortcomings of substance and logic matter less than they might in the hands of another filmmaker. His camera glides through a world of polished surfaces that suggest something sinister lurking beneath. He uses music (an original score by his composer son Matthieu, and evocative renditions by Polonski and Jeanne of Liszt's Funerailles) to enrich and complicate the atmosphere. He introduces the theme of identity confusion raised by the maternity ward mix-up to suggest the relativity of values in a world where even the basic certainty of family can't be relied on.
Chabrol has something certain to rely on, and that is the limpid talent of Isabelle Huppert, who here makes her sixth appearance as leading lady of his films. Huppert contrives to suggest great range and depth of feeling with barely a change of expression. Like the waters of Lake Geneva that glimmer palely below her house, her Mika is a still water that runs disturbingly deep. She embodies the banality of evil; she is a spider who spins her web driven not by crescendos of malevolence but by a soft, implacable sense of direction. The other performances are also fine, particularly Dutronc's brooding Polonski and newcomer Mouglalis's spirited and beautiful Jeanne
"A genre has its rules on the one hand, an appearance on the other, and finally, a tone," Chabrol has remarked in reference to this movie. "I'm more interested in the tone and the appearance than the rules." The tone and the appearance here envelope the movie in a hypnotic sheen; but in a thriller, the rules of logic demand a little more consideration. By disregarding them, Chabrol has drugged his own hot chocolate.
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