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American audiences got a taste of Claude Chabrol last May via Unfaithful, the Diane Lane-Richard Gere vehicle which was a remake of his 1969 film, La Femme Infidele. Now, you can catch Chabrol's most recently released directorial effort, 2000's Merci Pour Le Chocolat - a perfect example of why Chabrol has been referred to as The French Hitchcock throughout the majority of his career.
This time, Chabrol uses American mystery writer Charlotte Armstrong's novel, The Chocolate Cobweb, which he co-adapts here with Caroline Eliacheff, to get his Hitchcock on. The story isn't nearly as complicated as I'm about to make it seem, but it's the only way the plot can be briefly encapsulated by a review slapped with a limited word count. Let's start with some family history: André Polonski (musician Jacques Dutronc, Place Vendôme) is a famous concert pianist who was briefly married to a woman named Mika many years before the opening credits roll. After their divorce, André married Mika's friend Lisbeth, and their relationship spawned a son named Guillaume.
When Chocolat opens, André is marrying Mika (Isabelle Huppert, 8 Women) again - apparently Lisbeth was killed when she wrecked her car after falling asleep at the wheel. In the meantime, Mika has inherited her father's lucrative chocolate company, as well as her mother's secret recipe for delicious hot cocoa, which she gleefully prepares each evening for André and 18-year-old Guillaume (Chocolat's English-release title is Nightcap for this very reason).
One day, after seeing the wedding announcement for André and Mika in the paper, fellow Lausanne, Switzerland resident Louise (Brigitte Catillon) tells her 18-year-old daughter Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) a knee-slapper of a story in which, after giving birth, Jeanne was temporarily misidentified as André's son Guillaume. Since Jeanne is an aspiring pianist, she strikes up a friendship with André, and quickly discovers the two have much more in common than he and the tin-eared Guillaume. Perhaps that baby confusion at the hospital was never properly resolved after all.
This is not good news for Mika, who we slowly learn is adding a special ingredient to her cocoa - one that most likely resulted in the car crash that killed Lisbeth. And now here comes Jeanne, Lisbeth's spitting image, to lure André's attention away - almost as if she's returning from the grave for a final "fuck you" to her killer. Don't think I'm giving too much away here because Chocolat is one of those films where you know what the antagonist is up to (a whodunit), but the bulk of the film is spent trying to uncover the motives behind it (a whydunit).
There were a few times Chocolat had my head spinning, but not from any of the on-screen antics. It's just a coincidence that André is a pianist and has the last name Polonski, which is remarkably similar to that of director Roman Polanski, whose latest film is The Pianist. More happenstance in the form of Huppert's recent award-winning turn in The Piano Teacher probably had me overanalyzing the similarities between Mika and 8 Women's Augustine (they're both passive-aggressive freaks). Or, since Chocolat was released before 8 Women was made, maybe Huppert's Augustine was at least partly based on Mika.
At any rate, Chocolat is Huppert's show to steal and she makes a meal of it, channeling Kathy Baker's creepy turn as the repressed mother on Boston Public just as much as 8 Women's Augustine. A lesser (read: American) actress would have hammed this role up big-time, but Huppert doesn't, making her character all the more sinister. Chocolat is like a good truffle. The outside melts away fairly quickly, but Huppert's substantial center will allow you to savor it for quite a while.
1:33 - Not Rated
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